Luang Prabang, Laos

After our extremely long journey from Chiang Mai, we finally arrived in Luang Prabang! We had already booked our hostel, Liberty Guesthouse, which we knew was a new hostel. What we didn’t know was that nobody would know where it was! We showed the name of the hostel to the first tuc tuc we saw and after much confusion, he said he could take us. He was also driving many other tourists from our boat and we were the last stop. He finally stopped and said that we were there, but we told him we don’t see our hostel. He seemed all flustered and said ‘go down this street and just to the left.’ We got out (which turned out to be a very bad decision), because our hostel was nowhere near there! We tried to get directions from a travel agent place and after we walked for 15 minutes, found another tuc tuc, who actually went into another guest house to get directions. We had finally arrived!!!!

Our first day was spent walking around, trying out some of the different restaurants (we both decided we like Laos food quite a bit more than Thai food). In general we can get a good Laos meal, such as noodles and vegetables for $1.80. And we also really enjoy the meals too. We also went to the night market, which is similar to those in Thailand but they have much more interesting things to buy. Tons of scarves, blankets, statues, jewelrey, etc. They also sell Laos whiskey which has the snake inside, but we haven’t tried any of that yet (although I’ll need to get a picture.)

Night market

Our second day, we had booked a tour to go elephant riding again and kayaking. Our mahout let both of us take turns sitting on the elephant’s neck, and he became this little photographer man. He grabbed Katie’s camera and was climbing little hills and going up on rocks to get all sorts of crazy angles of us. Our elephant in general didn’t want to listen and was constantly going off in the wrong direction to eat leaves, or baby trees. She also went through this little body of water and would use her trunk to feel what was ahead of her before taking a step. This time though, we actually got to feed her afterwards which was really cool. We bought a bunch of bananas and gave them to her one at a time, which was awesome.

Good elephant!

Kissing an elephant

After the elephant ride, we went kayaking down the Nam Khong River. Our guide was very talkative and explained to us all about the life of the elephants and talked about the village people that lived down the river. We passed by tons of water buffalo and Laos fisherman. He also told us that if we want to see clear water and waterfalls, we need to go to the Kuang Si waterfall, so we decided to do that the following day! After much bardering, we managed to get a tuc tuc ride to the waterfall and back for $4.00 a person (he also waited there for us for THREE hours!). It was definitely worth it because the water was actually truly blue. It was amazing… but I’ll let you see for yourself. 

Next stop-Vang Vieng for tubing!-Kelsey