Vientiane and Koh Chang

Happy new year, everyone! Apologies for the lack of posts for a while – we have been relaxing on the beach and settling into the new year!

Last time I wrote were we were due to arrive into Vientiane, where we spent a couple of days. It's a small and pretty French colonial city and Laos' capital. 

At times - if you ignore the tuk-tuks - you could be mistaken for thinking you're in Paris: cafes with blackboards written in perfect French handwriting, run by French ex-pats, advertising duck a l'orange and 'jambon beurre' baguettes, tucked in amongst the Laotian cafes selling fried noodles.

Can you spot the French influence?

We also found a Tintin-themed Belgian beer cafe, which Kev just couldn't resist!

Drinking with Tintin in the Belgian beer cafe

We spent a morning at COPE (http://copelaos.org), a museum dedicated to telling the story of Laos' unexploded ordnance following the Vietnam war – and the resulting need for prosthetics caused by injuries from cluster bombs.

Laos is the most bombed country in the world per capita. The impact of the Vietnam war in Laos was equivalent to bombs being dropped every eight minutes, 24/7 for nine years, non-stop. Thirty percent of the cluster bombs dropped did not detonate and are therefore still active. 

Much of the land is used for farming so the unexplored 'bombies' (individual bombs, about the size of an orange, within the larger cluster bomb shell) still pose a very real threat today. However, with new bomb search and disposal techniques, they hope to clear all remaining ordnance by 2020.

As we travel south, the weather is starting to get warmer. We felt it first in the move from Vang Vieng to Vientiane, and then again through Bangkok into Koh Chang. Fortunately, also the roads are becoming less mountainous, though the minivan drivers remain as crazy as ever! 

We passed through a town called Trat – the jumping off point for Koh Chang and randomly met a man who lives in Truro – it’s a small world and the Cornish really do get everywhere! 

Koh Chang is Thailands third largest island and is just south of Bangkok. It has a mountainous, jungle interior and is fringed with pretty sandy beaches on the west coast – the perfect place for a spot of rest and relaxation.

White Sands Beach

Arriving in time for new year we were fortunate to stay on a fairly quiet part of the island, so we were able to avoid the worst of the (hideous) new year’s eve’s parties on the beaches - and found a secluded part of our local beach, Pearl Beach, to toast in the new year. Nearby White Sands Beach and (somewhat inappropriately named) Lonely Beach were 'party central', so well worth avoiding!

We hired a scooter to get around and made Kai Bae Beach our home for the week. Three times a day the elephants from a nearby elephant camp would be walked down the beach to bathe in the sea (which from experience, we know they love! 

Elephants on Kai Bae Beach

I just hope they were not forced to also do circus tricks for tourists in the camp). In any case, they seemed to love the ocean and were well used to human contact. You could walk right up to them in the sea and touch them if you wanted, but even the baby ones are pretty strong so I kept a safe distance!

Baby elephant, Kai Bae Beach

One afternoon we hired a kayak and paddled around on of the small off-islands off Kai Bae Beach. It took forty-five minutes and was a welcome break from the inactivity of sitting around on the beach. That said, I think some beach time was long overdue after a month in land-locked northern Thailand and Laos.

Kayaking

The sea is the perfect temperature (probably somewhere around twenty-nine degrees Celcius) and the weather around the mid-thirties. The afternoons have been overcast and slightly cooler and fortunately, too, there have not been many mosquitoes around - paradise!

White Sands Beach

Next, we head back to Bangkok in order to head to our next location: Phuket and then on to some of the other islands.

Luang Prabang

We had a really easy border crossing from Thailand into Laos, the officials were friendly and the border police even asked the bus driver to take a selfie with us after asking where we’re from! 

With some time to kill at the bus station, we stopped for some food on the Laos side of the border – we had a choice of noodle soup or noodle soup: presumably it’s the only dish on the menu that the staff know how to say in English (and our Laos language is limited to three words at present) – so two noodle soups it was, with a can of the local Beer Lao. The soup itself was a lot like Vietnamese pho: a thin broth with thin rice noodles, beansprouts, spring onions, meatballs, tripe (or at least I think that’s what it was – I didn’t eat that bit!) and a wedge of lime to squeeze over the top.

On the whole, Laos is a bit more expensive than Thailand, despite being poorer and less developed. The currency (Kip) is 10,000 to the Pound, so we are enjoying being millionaires every time we go to the cash point!

From the border, we took an overnight bus into Luang Prabang, which took fourteen hours. Believe it or not this was the quickest option, with most tourists opting for the two-day slow boat up the Mekong. With hindsight, we wish we had also taken this option as the entire fourteen hours was on winding, pot-holed, mountainous roads. We had bunks on the bus, so lying down it felt even more precarious! 

If I thought the journey to Pai in Thailand was bad, it turns out most of Laos’ roads are like an extreme version of this – with sections of unpaved road, lots of pot-holes for good measure and many trucks driving through the night.

Night buses in Asia are also famous for having freezing cold air conditioning blasting out all night – we had on all our clothes, including fleeces, scarves and woolly hats and we were still cold! Arriving into Luang Prabang at five am, we were certainly pleased to get off, but we then had to wait until we could check in at our guesthouse. The cafés didn’t even open until 6.30 so it was a long and tired wait, but it is at least the only night bus we have planned to take on this trip. 

Luang Prabang has a big French influence. There are bilingual schools and all the cafes serve baguettes and crepes. After our time in Thailand, it was lovely to have fresh baguettes again, instead of the usual sliced, white loaf.
It’s a beautiful, well-preserved city. All the shop fronts have the same style wooden signs with lettering and there are lots of golden temples, but the buildings also have a colonial French style to them.

The coffee here is also excellent, grown locally and served Vietnamese-style with condensed milk in the bottom of the cup. It’s very sweet but very strong and delicious. 

The local-style cafes light two fires in the morning and keep them burning all day. On one fire, there’s a big pot for brewing the coffee and on the other is the stock for the noodle soup. In contrast, there are also lots of more western-style restaurants and cafes – all charging western prices.

One day we took a minivan to Keung Si waterfall, twenty kilometres out of town and which apparently, cannot be missed. The main waterfall is spectacular and cascades from a great height.

The water then continues downstream into turquoise pools and further falls. We started with a walk to the top of the falls and ended the day with a swim in one of the pools at the bottom.

Another afternoon we did a boat trip on the Mekong – a local man took us out in his boat (something like a house boat, but adapted with additional seats to take out passengers and living quarters at the back).

We cruised upstream for thirty minutes, then he cut the engines and let the current take us back downstream, whilst he did some fishing. We were lucky enough to have the boat to ourselves – it does seem to be really quiet here at the moment, despite being peak season.

 

On our last day, we took a walk up the steps to Mount Phousi – a mountain viewpoint with a temple at the top and great views out over the city, the river and the mountains beyond. If I thought before that it was quiet on the river, then it must be because all the tourists were at the top of Mount Phousi – all there to see the sunset! It was so busy it was almost impossible to take a photo without someone’s selfie stick in the way, so we decided not to stay for the sunset and to head somewhere a little quieter…

Luang Prabang is a small, but picturesque city and after three days here we feel like we’ve got a good feel for it. Our next stop will be Vang Vieng, where we’ll be for Christmas. I’ll write again once there.

Happy Christmas everyone!