Day 313 - Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng (Laos)

The well-worn path from Chiang Mai to the northern Laos city of Luang Prabang is a fearsome one. It is not for the faint-hearted. In the same way that Russell Brand probably wouldn't make a good Dalai Lama.

First, you pile on a bus to the Thai-Laos border. It takes about six hours. Alas, the timing is such that you arrive after the border has shut, meaning a requisite overnight stay. End of Day One.

Day Two involves festering in line(s) to get the necessary stamps and authorisations, before boarding a cramped riverboat for a nine-hour ride down the Mekong. Sometime just after sunset, you arrive at Pak Beng. This fetid slurry-pit of a town is your home for the night. If you're lucky, you might manage to avoid sharing a room with rats the size of beagles. It's the end of Day Two.

Day Three dawns early. It's back onto the boats again. Another long, miserable, noisy nine hours before you finally disembark at the World Heritage-listed city of Luang Prabang. It may take a few days for the ringing in your ears to stop, but you are there! And all for the bargain price of $20 per person!

Of course, there is another option. If you are willing to forgo the sanctity of "the experience", you can grab a direct flight with Lao Airlines. It takes an hour, and costs $160.

Which is exactly what we did. Subject ourselves to three days of that farcical voyage to Hell? Not bloody likely. The smelly backpacker crowd can have it. Daft bastards.

Laos, for the uninitiated, is a country of four million friendly souls. She's  landlocked on high land between Vietnam and Thailand, just above Cambodia. It's a communist country, although you wouldn't really know it. It also has a reputation for being very laid back.

There's a saying in this part of the world. The Thais plant the rice. The Vietnamese sell the rice. The Lao people watch it grow.

Luang Prabang is a good case in point. It's a sleepy town, situated on a peninsula between the Mekong and Nam Kong rivers. It's a bit of a living museum, dominated by numerous conspicuous wats (temples) and the highest-concentration of monks of any city on the planets. More bald ginger blokes than Edinburgh city centre during Hogmanay.

It is entertaining enough. However, once you've had your fill of Beer Lao sat on the banks of the river, and wandered through the markets wondering where on earth so many antiques could possibly have come from, noting all the charmless boutique hotels springing up in the city centre, it all starts to get a bit boring.

So, joined by Briar, fresh off the plane from Sydney, we headed to the hills. Three days of mountain biking, trekking, elephant riding and kayaking. Sore bums. Aching shoulders. Action Jacksons! Much more the pace I've come to know and love.

Just the tonic before our visit to the most notorious of all Laos destinations; the backpacker central and mothersbane that is Vang Vieng.

She's a bit of a controversial venue is the ol' double V. The culture-vulture crowd despise it. "Wanton rape of Laos' cultural heritage", or some such tosh. Like the twentieth century never happened.

Conversely, to your average twenty-something gap-year student it's earnt the reputation of a veritable modern-day Valhalla. Cheap booze, all manner of legally-ambiguous substances to be scoffed and a catalogue of ways to shorten an already short life.

The truth is somewhere in between. Vang Vieng won't make you a better person, but it isn't Satan's pool hall either.

Tubing down the river, stopping in at the various bars that line each side is actually quite a bit of fun (Wet 'n' Wild for adults!). The swings and slides are, in all truth, death traps. But, if you pick carefully, they can also be fun. The bars and clubs on Dhon Khang island are another world. Fun - Never Never Land meets Alex Garland's The Beach - and you'll be doing someone's Mum a favour in making sure someone vaguely sober-ish is there to ensure their totally non-sober son/ daughter doesn't fall to a certain death.

The thing is; for all the criticism, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang are two sides of the same coin:

Vang Vieng - De-sanitised Laotian chaos accompanied by cheap beer, westernised food and plentiful cut-price drugs, to give twenty-somethings doing it on-the-cheap their gap-year fix.

Luang Prabang - Sanitised Laotian quaintness accompanied by cheap wine, westernised food, and plentiful cut-price antiques, to give middle-incomers doing it on-the-cheap their holiday fix.

And that's about the fairest comparison I can offer.


Click on the links for photos from Luang Prabang and Vang Vieng