I lay in bed staring up at my mosquito net. I really didn’t want to leave. But I was due to catch the 11am bus back to Luang Prabang as my Mekong cruise to the Thai border left tomorrow morning. Once again, I kicked myself for making plans too far in advance – it means you can’t respond so easily to what’s going on. After the recent energetic days, a lazy day in the hammock on our balcony was very appealing.
But this is Asia. So I called the cruise agent and less than five minutes later my cruise was postponed to Sunday. In England, the administration surrounding this would be a nightmare. Here, when they just asked me to come into the office when I got back to Luang Prabang so they could “change my ticket”. This meant they’d cross out “Wednesday” and write “Sunday”.
Laos has surprised me. Talking to travellers earlier in my trip who’d been here, the general consensus was that “there wasn’t so much to do”, “two weeks will be enough to see it” and it was “behind” compared to the other countries on my itinerary. All three are utter rubbish. There may not be so many grand attractions, but there’s no shortage of things to see and do. Two weeks is enough if you go from Vientiane via Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang and then head to Thailand. But there’s so much more to the place and it doesn’t take much to scratch the surface (and, unlike Vietnam, it’s fairly easy to see the real Lao rather than the pre-arranged tourist version). And I’ve also seen little evidence that it’s “behind”. In fact, in many respects it’s more advanced. For instance, most major cities have a “smoke-free” policy (you can smoke everywhere in Vietnam except the explosives factory); only the remotest villages still make their dwellings out of bamboo and wood – most have at least a few made of concrete (unlike Cambodia); and infrastructure isn’t bad, not up to UK standards, I’ll grant you, but much better than I’d been led to believe.
It made me wonder what a UXO-free Lao would look like…
Awesome bug of the day:
And this is me blogging from the owner’s laptop (kindly loaned for an hour or so):
