Luang Prabang Take Two - Less quiche, more sweat

Our next day in Luang Prabang was designated a cheap day, which is basically just an excuse to do nothing but spend several hours sitting in cafes. Western food is actually easier to find in Luang Prabang than Asian food, although Lao coffee is everywhere and bizarrely is usually cheaper than Nescafe instant stuff. We had brunch at a cafe run by a French woman but staffed by Lao people, and I satisfied my craving for potatoes. The afternoon was mostly spent exploring a bit more of the town, and engaging in protracted and tense negotiations at the book exchange.

We had dinner at a restaurant called Lao Lao garden, which was festooned in  pink balloons for Valentine's Day.  The restaurant specialised in Lao barbecue, so after we had downed our free shots of Lao whiskey, our waiter set up an individual barbecue in the middle of our table, with a lid on top of it where you could make soup and cook meat. He brought us stock, fat to cook our meat in, a selection of vegetables and noodles, an egg, and strips of chicken, pork and water buffalo. We also had limes, chillies, garlic and tamarind sauce to add to the soup and the meat. It was a lot of fun and the end result was really tasty, although I kept adding more chillies until Dave's puny tastebuds were committing harakiri, and our attempt to involve the egg in the proceedings was just a complete debacle...

It was an early start on Monday, for our first organized tour. We were travelling by truck a short distance up the Nam Ou river, then kayaking downstream onto the Mekong. Rather unfortunately our fellow kayakers turned out to be four massive English guys, wearing about a square cm of cotton between them, none of whom looked like they had even been in the same room as someone who had been picked last in PE before.

Our guide was a Lao guy who had been working for the travel agency for about a year, after being a monk for six years. He was very excitable with a contagious laugh, and he seemed to find everything funny. We dragged our kayaks about 200m down to the river through rough scrub, and then got in, after donning our life jackets and helmets. I had never done kayaking or canoeing before, and found the movement of the paddles really difficult at first. Dave had once done an hour of kayaking in a swimming pool, so found it only slightly easier. We capsized twice before lunch; the first time I got confused and thought you were meant to grab the paddle rather than the boat, so I got swept away a bit in the current before two of the English guys paddled over to rescue me. Each time we capsized they were forced to halt their massive, synchronized strokes in order to wait for us, but they didn't seem to mind too much...

Lunch was fried rice with chicken on a beach at the of the Nam Ou. Afterwardswe paddled for another half hour or so to some nearby caves, which were filled with sculptures of Buddha. Then it was another 45 minutes of kayaking down the Mekong to the elephant camp. I was terrified we would capsize again and a giant catfish would swallow me whole, but we got there without any trouble and actually seemed to be improving near the end. It was very hard work though, and we both had blisters on our thumbs the next day.


Next came an elephant ride through the jungle, for about forty minutes. It was a lot of fun, although very slow. Going down steep hills was a bit scary as well, as we ended up at some strange angles! We had a guide who sat on the elephant's neck and rode it like a horse, while singing traditional songs to it the whole time, which he told us the elephant liked. Apparently our elephant was 38 years old and called Dowfaah. 

Our travel agency had a truck ready to take us back to Luang Prabang after the ride, where we got ready to head onto Vang Vieng in the morning. By nighttime I could barely move my arms due to the kayaking, so we got a takeaway pizza from one of the bakeries in town and headed back to our hostel.