LAUNG PRABANG

Laung Prabang is a beautiful city, its just like a French villa with its cobble stone roads, balconies, fresh baguettes and rustic restaurants at every turn. We got to town in the afternoon and ventured off into the night market. I have been to a hundred and one night markets but this one takes the first prize with its beautiful silk scarves, handy crafts, and curious items. All the vendors sitting on the ground and some were even asleep…

Laos has a completely different rhythm, everything is so laid back it makes you feel like time just slows down and you can truly savour relaxing. On our second day, Trav wasn’t feeling too well, he had been complaining for the past few days; fist the joint pain, then headaches, but that day he had a really bad fever, so we decided to spend the day reading at a rustic little café that had a mini library with book exchange and delicious chai tea. When the sun cooled down a little, we made our way up the 346 steps to the main temple. The way up was beautiful, with golden Buddha’s surrounded by vegetation. At the top, one of the best views I have seen so far, orange roof tops and lots of temples, green mountains in the background and the river encircling and containing the city.

The next morning Trav woke up with a rash. This did not seem strange since he had slept with a sweatshirt and covered in blankets in a country where the temperature does not go below 25 Celsius. So we thought it was a heat rash… but later that day when we were hanging out at our café, we ran into a couple of American guys and they introduced Dengue. Dengue is a viral infection similar to malaria in being carried by mosquitoes and is very common in South East Asia. There are no prevention methods or treatment but all the symptoms are just what Trav had, especially the give away of a rash, so we came to the conclusion that it was dengue all along … but luckily Trav is not in the 5% for which the disease is lethal and he is fully recovered now.

The next day we took a tour to go see the whiskey village, the Buddha cave and some waterfalls. The whiskey village is known for making rice whiskey, and it is probably the strongest alcohol I have ever tried, it was 50% , I could feel it burning as it made its way down. The interesting part is that they pickle animals and insects and put them inside the bottles with the whiskey. Snakes are used to treat rheumatism and pain, scorpions are used for power, bear paws for who knows what… we bough a bottle with a cobra in it, but by the time we decided to try it is smelled like rotting fish so we couldn’t finish all of it… but according to them you are supposed to eat whichever animal is inside. After that we went to visit a cave which is used for religious purposes. On the upper cave, they have an archway to do a cleansing ceremony and the lower cave is filled with hundreds of Buddha images, which grows each year as they celebrate. After lunch we went to the waterfall, which turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. It had hundreds of turquoise pools to swim in and a Tarzan-like rope to jump in. The main waterfall was about 100m tall, it had yellow rocks and lots of surrounding vegetation. The only downfall of this paradise were the “little fish” in the water who were more big than little and bit you very obnoxiously.

That night we had a Lao BBQ, in which you have a grill in the middle of the table and you cook your own meat, vegetables and eggs. It was really fun even though we had no idea what we were doing and Trav somehow put hot peppers up his nose … but all and all it was delicious.