Laos- the land of a million elephants, dramatic lush mountains, and gentle people. After enjoying a short trip to Penang, we made our way make to Langkawi and secured Paseafique in Rebak Marina. Then we set off for a two week visit of landlocked Laos. I have a former work colleague and good friend who has been working there for the last five years and I had been wanting to visit her, and the country, for ages. We just made it in time as she is finishing up her job and leaving at the end of June.

Our short itinerary started in Luang Prabang, and moved south to Vang Vieng and then finally to the capital, Vientiane. We were lucky that my friend escaped early from work on the Friday we arrived and picked us up at the airport. I had not realised that although you can get a visa on entry to Laos, there is a fee of US$30. We did not have any US dollars or Laos kip on us, as we had planned on making a withdrawal of kip at the airport. However, the ATMs were all outside the airport. This did not seem to bother the airport officials who told us to go out, get the money and come back in – even though at this stage we had not been processed! We tentatively went through the one way sliding glass doors and found my friend waiting there for us. She readily lent us the required fee and we dashed back in as the doors opened for someone else coming out. The formalities done, my friend then took us to her place for the weekend. Her house is a bit out of town and overlooks the Mekong River, and the veranda provided the perfect place for sundowners – some rituals are the same whether on land or sea!

My friend spoilt us over the weekend showing us some of the highlights of the area, and visiting her favourite restaurants and cafes. We visited the Kuang Si falls which were just spectacular – a series of waterfalls and blue pools. Perfect place to cool off (and I mean cool) on a hot Saturday afternoon.

On the way back to Luang Prabang, we stopped off at an elephant camp and spent a good while there watching the elephants and feeding them their afternoon snacks. They can actually peel a piece of banana plant with their trunks once they crush it slightly by standing on it. Having disposed of the outer layers they are then rewarded with the sweet inner part. The baby elephant that I am feeding in the photo was very cute.

The next day after breakfast at a great café, we took the ferry across to the other side of the Mekong river and went for a walk through some small villages, visited a temple and a cave, and enjoyed some great views of Luang Prabang back across the river. After a late lunch, we retreated to my friend’s shady veranda for the rest of what was a very hot day.

Luang Prabang, although small, is a fairly sophisticated city and has its share of trendy cafes, bars, bakeries, and restaurants. The Mekong makes for a striking setting and the many flowering trees and plants are very pretty. Luang Prabang is also relatively clean and free from rubbish in the streets. Unlike most of Asia we have seen, the main streets have footpaths which are fairly well maintained and free from clutter, which is great for pedestrians.

Sundowners at Utopia

On Monday morning while my friend went back to work, we moved to a French guest house, La Bougainvillia, in town. It proved to be a great base for the rest of our time there – very centrally located with the morning market right out front, recently renovated rooms, great breakfast, and importantly very good air conditioning so we could escape the worst of the afternoon heat and revive ourselves for the evenings. We visited the Royal Palace Museum and the Traditional Arts and Technology Centre, both of which provided interesting insights into Lao history and ethnic traditions.

Temple in the grounds of the Royal Palace Museum – it houses the Luang Prabang Buddha which is used for special celebrations

Mount Phousi is readily accessible from town and the view was lovely. Lots of Buddha statues.

We spent a day taking a trip up the Meking river to the Pak Ou caves where visitors can see enough statues of Buddha to last a lifetime. Along the banks of the river we spotted elephants and water buffaloes.

During one of our meanders through the Luang Prabang streets and laneways, we ran into a lovely Vietnamese man and his 70 year old mother whom we had first befriended at the airport in Kuala Lumpur when we were on our way to Laos. It was very funny to see them again!

We caught up with my friend for dinner at two fabulous locations during the week. The first was a place called Secret Pizza. This is run by an Italian man and his Lao wife at their property on the outskirts of town. They have set up an outdoor restaurant around a wood fired pizza oven next to their house. The restaurant is only open two nights each week and when they first started it, the location really was a bit of a secret. Now however, it is listed in the Lonely Planet travel guide, and most of the tuk tuk drivers seem to know how to get there. Great pizza and decadent profiteroles for dessert! The second was at a restaurant overlooking the Mekong, and the evening included a set menu dinner and a film. As the sun set over the river, we were served our meal, and once darkness had settled, the film, called The Rocket, was screened. It so happened that this film had been made in Laos by an Australian film maker and using a Lao cast most of whom had not acted before. Most of the film had been shot in and around Vang Vieng, which was the next place on our itinerary. The film had been refused official approval for screening in Laos so the viewing was somewhat clandestine, and it had only been publicised by word of mouth. It was a great movie to see after we had been in the country for a few days as we could appreciate some of the humour and the cultural references. The story was centred around a Hmong family, comprising grandmother, parents and one son, who had been displaced, along with the rest of their village, by a dam building project. The story culminated with the father and son both competing at a rocket festival, held every year at the change of season to bring on the rain. This is actually a Lao tradition and these festivals are held all over the country. People build rockets which are launched at the festival before a panel of judges, and the rocket which goes the highest wins a cash prize. We really enjoyed the movie and little did we know that very soon we would get to witness this spectacle for real.

The bus trip to Vang Vieng, some 125 kilometres south of Luang Prabang, took 4 hours and was a bit hairy, like many bus rides through mountainous Asian countries. Our driver seemed to particularly like overtaking on curves for some reason. I decided it was best to focus on the view rather than the driving!  

While we were disembarking at the bus depot in Vang Vieng, we ran into our Vietnamese friend and his mother yet again! They had spent a few days in Vang Vieng and were on their way back to Vietnam. Vang Vieng is a small town, situated on the Nam Song river, and with a magnificent mountainous backdrop. We stayed in a very nice hotel, Silver Naga, and were lucky enough to be given a room with a fabulous view across the river to the mountains.

Vang Vieng has had a reputation as a party town for backpackers and a popular activity was drifting down the river on a large tyre tube from bar to bar, which serve the locally brewed whiskey among other cheap drinks by the small bucketful. Needless to say quite a few tourists drowned each year or suffered sometimes serious ill effects of the potent local brew. However, the Laos government has tidied all this up a bit, shutting down a number of the bars. The town has since been re-inventing itself as a base for ecotourism.

As we were to have only two full days there, we organised a kayak and cave trip for the next day, and then decided to leave the second day unplanned. On our first evening there we went for a walk to check the place out and to find somewhere to eat. The town itself is a bit of a building site, with piles of rubble everywhere. It is a bit hilly and has various laneways and a couple of bamboo bridges over to the “other side”. We ventured across one of these bridges and came across a bar set up right on the edge of the river comprising of a series of bamboo gazebos, each of which would seat about 6 people or so. Out front in the river were a few large tyres that have been tied to the bottom so you can sit in one of these in the river, sipping your drink. We decided this would be a great place for a sundowner so we spent a very pleasant couple of hours there, ending up having a hamburger and chips for dinner! We discovered on the way home that this place is called Smile Beach Bar.

We were picked up early the next morning for our day on the river. We were taken by van to our kayaking start point up river, and spent the morning kayaking about 6 kms down the river to the lunch stop. It was a fairly easy stretch to navigate with just a couple of rapids to pass through. It would have been a considerably more demanding activity during the wet season. While our lunch was being prepared, the guide took us through a nearby cave, the entrance to which is via a creek that eventually joins the x river. The water was too deep to walk through so we each got onto a large tyre tube and pulled ourselves along some ropes through the extremely cold water to the cave entrance. The cave itself was not anything special but did have some interesting history as the locals used it as protection from the many bombing raids they endured during the Vietnam war.

After a very tasty lunch, it was back into the kayaks for the final leg down into Vang Vieng. As we were nearing the location of our Smile Beach Bar, we noticed three large bamboo structures being erected along the shore amdist a hive of activity. We asked our guide about this and were told, to our amazement and delight, that they were setting up for the rocket festival to be held the next day! We couldn’t believe our luck and were very pleased that we had no planned activity. And was the festival ever an experience! You can read about it in the separate blog – A festival with a difference.

We saw this restaurant on the “other side” one night and it looked so gorgeous that we ventured out there for dinner. The reality though was quite different- uncomfortable and there were just loads of insects.

And so, on to the capital Vientaine, which was actually called Vieng Chian before the French arrived in Laos. This time the bus trip was a bit more tame and most of it was on straight flat roads.

As far as an Asian capital city goes, Vientiane is fairly laid back and less frenetic. We visited the Patuxai, the Laos version of the Arc de Triumph, a structure that apparently was built with funds and cement donated by the USA to build an airport. It is dedicated to the memory of Laotian soldiers who died in WWII and also during the independence war from France. It is now a drab and crumbling structure but there are good views from the top.

The Laos army museum was an interesting, but frustrating, place to visit, as there was no cohesive narrative about the various wars. There were guns, tanks, jeeps and planes on display with signs indicating which country had provided them (Russia or China usually), where and when they had been deployed and what had been shot or taken over. Similarly, there were many displays of army officer’s uniforms, crockery, hats etc which signs telling the viewer that these belonged to Comrade whoever, and indicating where he used them. We had hoped that the national museum would give us more insight into the history of Laos, but unfortunately it was pretty much the same kind of display there too. The exception was the archaeological history which was quite well told and displayed.  I spent a few hours on google reading up on Laotian history only to find it is very complicated and I gave up trying to get it all straight in my mind!

One unfortunate consequence of the Vietnam war of which we were previously unaware is that the US dropped more bombs on Laos than the total number of bombs dropped in WWII. And Laos was not even in that war, but the Ho Chi Min trail along which arms were being brought into Vietnam did cut through Laos and it was this supply chain that the US was trying to disrupt.  The problem now is that about one third of these cluster bombs did not detonate and so are sprinkled around the Laos countryside where they wreak havoc when struck with farming implements, ignited by fires nearby, or found by children.  Each cluster bomb is about the size of a tennis ball and is filled with explosives. We visited the Cooperative and Orthotic Prosthetic Engerprise (COPE), an organisation which has been training local people to make low cost prosthetic devices and also how to provide rehabilitation services for those who have been unfortunate enough to lose one, or more, limbs due to these cluster bombs. Interestingly, the rehabilitative capacity that COPE has developed in Laos is now also benefiting those who have lost limbs in road or occupational incidents. Other organisations within Laos have been working to clear areas of the undetonated bombs, while others have been educating people about the bombs and their dangers, and how they can reduce their risk of being exposed to them. As a result, the number of incidents involving the cluster bombs has reduced from several hundred a year to less than 50.

Weaving is a very significant activity in Laos, with the secrets of using natural dyes and weaving techniques handed down over generations. The fabrics and designs are truly spectacular. We spent a few fascinating hours at a weaving centre watching the painstaking way in which hand woven designs take shape.  No wonder the hand woven pieces are not very wide, and are very expensive!

On the bus to Vientiane, we had met an interesting Laotian guy, Alex, who plays guitar and divides his time between Vang Vieng and Vientiane. When we were wandering back to our hotel one evening, we glanced into a restaurant only to find Alex sitting there entertaining the diners with his music. So we returned there the next night for our last evening in Laos and enjoyed our meal and Alex’s live music.

There are some seriously lavish stupas and temples in Vientiane!