Days 5 & 6 - Luang Prabang

On saturday morning, we got out of bed at 05:15 (ow). We had to take a plane at 9 to Luang Prabang from Hanoi - it's an old town in Laos.

Arriving at 10:30, we went to the hotel, then into town to have lunch. At 13:30, we met up back at the hotel to go for a walk into the town.

We took a tuc-tuc (it's a small motorbike taxi that can carry 7 people) over to the Royal Palace (which is now a national museum). The reason Luang Prabang has a royal palace is that Laos was originally split into 3 kingdoms - it was only united recently - and Luang was the capital of one.

We took the tucs to a buddhist temple, and on to Phou See - a(nother) temple on the top of a hill in the center of Luang Prabang. After that, we went back to the hotel.

On Sunday, we took a longtail boat up the Mekong River to the Pak Ou caves (roughly 25km from Luang Prabang). Because of the current, it's a 2 hour journey upriver and a 1 hour journey downriver. The caves themselves are not important to the Lao, but they contain over 4000 Buddha-statues of various age.

Back in Luang Prabang, we drove to the Kuang Si waterfalls - another 25 km - where we bathed for an hour before going back to town for the night.

Tomorrow, we'll be driving to Phonsavan for most of the day - it's the town that is going to be the base for our visit to the Plain of Jars.

Also, I apologize for the lack of pictures - due to hotel bandwidth it's completely impossible to upload anything here. I'll try in Phonsavan.

 ~Kristoffer