Sarah & Richard's Travels

After our lovely two day slow boat from Thailand we arrived in Luang Prabang in the north of Laos, which we both immediately loved. There is something about it that is just chilled out. No one is in a rush, there's plants and trees everywhere, in fact when you climb up Phousi Mountain in the middle of town, pretty much all you can see is trees and the jungle in the distance. You can easily wander around town in a couple of hours but there's loads of boutique shops, little alleys and awesome bars and cafes to explore, so it can take awhile at the same time!

Our favourite place was a bar called Utopia, situated on the Nam Khan river it was like a tropical oasis with loungers and chilled out areas overlooking the river, a volleyball court, and loads of tables amongst trees, it was gorgeous we could have spent hours there!

Kayaking
We spent a day kayaking down the river and visited Tad Sae waterfalls which were gorgeous! It was beautiful turquoise water cascading over smooth stones down through the jungle with all these trees in and around the waterfalls. There were pools at the base of the falls and at various levels throughout where we could swin and the water was cold, but refreshing! The rest of the day was spent kayaking down the river which was pretty easy with only a few sets of rapids, that were quite fun. We did pretty well in our double (unlike on Ko Tao) until we had to kayak over the end of the rapids to our exit point where the current carried us into a tree! Oops.

Weaving
Another day was spent learning to weave and we are both very proud to have our own hand woven placemats! lol. There's a cool little gallery and weaving centre called Ock Pok Tok (or something like that) where they do up to three day weaving courses so we signd up for a day and learnt the art of dying silk and weaving. The dye lesson was cool as it used all natural products - bark, lemongrass, indigo leaves, tumeric root and various other natural products which we either boiled up in water or made into a paste with a pestle and mortar before adding cold water and then dropping in the silk strands and stirring them around for while. Sometimes we had to add things to strengthen or weaken the colour - rusty nails to make red and lime to get a darker green, so it was pretty interesting really. In the afternoon we started with our placemats which took around 4 hours for us to make! The professionals who were teaching us (two local girls) can make 5-6 peices (much larger as well) in a day! At first it was pretty quiet as we concentrated trying to get our footing right on the pedals, throwing the shuttle across, banging down the threads and then doing it all again from the other direction. We eventually got the hang of this but by that time it was time for the pattern which brought chaos with the addition of another shuttle and colour and having to lift up pieces of thread and inserting a plank of wood to lift up different threads to create the pattern! We got a few laughs from our teachers and they had to jump in and fix things a couple of times but we got there eventually and then started the easy part again - yay! The last part was done for us luckily as it involved setting up the loom and taking bits and pieces out which I think would have confused us completely! It was a pretty fun day and great to do something a bit different to what we've been doing so far.

Hiring Bikes
We hired bikes one day and explored the city, tried to make it out 36kms to another waterfall, but it was way to hot and hilly so turned back about half way. One of my friend's who has been cycling South East Asia for a few months would have been aghast at our effort! Next time...or we could just try a tuk tuk.

Monks Receiving Alms
We got up at the extremely early hour of 6am to see the Monks receing alms one morning. Every day the monks come down the main road of Luang Prabang to receive food and other offerings from people along the main road. I couldn't believe how many tourists stood in front of them and pretty much shoved cameras in their faces and also used the flash, it was terrible! Granted I got a couple of shots as well, but not from up close and not with the flash - it just didn't seem right to be disturbing them like that. There were locals (and a few good tourists) lining the pavement kneeling on thier mats and blessing and offering sticky rice, bananas and other foods and flowers to the monks as they passed who would put the offerings into their big steel pots they were carrying over their shoulders. I'm not quite sure about the traditions behind the alms so must find out, but I was a bit perplexed about the four monks also giving alms and not receiving... Also on the other side of the monks stood little kids waiting with plastic bags for food from the monks. I was surprised that they were 'allowed' to do that (they didn't look like homeless kids, in fact we saw no homeless people), but there were loads of kids and a few monks would drop a few pieces of food in the bags.