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5 week trip November - December 2002 Part 2 Luang Prabang - Northern Thailand

5 week trip November - December 2002 Part 2 Luang Prabang - Northern Thailand

Old Jan 18th, 2006, 10:17 AM
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5 week trip November - December 2002 Part 2 Luang Prabang - Northern Thailand

Part 1 of this report – Bangkok to Siem Reap should be on this link
http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...7&tid=34737437

LUANG PRABANG

After we had checked our bags in for our Bangkok Airways flight to Luang Prabang, we couldn’t find our passport photos for our Laos visa. We assumed that they must have been in our checked bags. In fact they were lurking at the bottom of one of our handbags all along but in the meantime we got new sets done upstairs in Bangkok airport. Good flight in another colourful plane and the plane comes in right over the top of Luang Prabang so our first view of Mount Phusi is from above.

We stayed in Sala Prabang for one night but checked out because the room was at street level and had a glass wall, which meant having to keep the curtains shut all the time. With a bit of luck, we benefited from a late cancellation at the Sayo guesthouse behind Sala Prabang and ended up with the huge upstairs corner room that I had read about on this site. What a contrast - enormous windows with lots of light. Very high ceilings with the front windows looking out to the temple across the road and Mount Phusi in the distance. Children in the street below playing the popular game of chuck the flip-flop, where you seem to use the same technique as skimming stones across water to see how far the flip-flop will skim along the street. Old and young children would spend hours amusing themselves this way (one day we saw that they had bets going with a little bundle of kip in the road!) We never saw children with plastic toys – sometimes great games of football with bamboo woven balls and children playing shop with Bangkok Airways blue in-flight meal boxes.

LP is an incredibly laid back place. It is a fine place to wander, shop, eat in a relaxed fashion. The old part of the town is full of working wats and one way or another monks are quite a presence in LP. There can be drumming and cymbals at 4am from the wat across the road from where we are staying, but not every night. A wonderful, hypnotic rhythm. Sometimes chanting. More drums again at 6.15am before the monks set off on the morning procession for the giving of alms. Monks were in evidence in the wats doing things most of the day – laying paths, whitewashing, cutting bougainvillea, but they also have their time off and attend classes and you see them wandering about town. In the evening there is chanting and the wats with a high number of young monks are particularly nice to listen to. Their life seems to be a mixture of liberal and structured, serious and relaxed but not idle. They are nearly all under 25 and some a lot younger and there are very few older monks in evidence.

We ate breakfast every morning at the riverside restaurant across the road from Sala Prabang. Watching river life on the Mekong was about as fine a way to start a morning as any I could imagine. At night the riverside restaurants are all lit up with fairy lights and very charming. There are some restaurants that wouldn’t be out of place in any major city – two notable ones being L’Elephant and Apsara. We also ate at the French Restaurant of the Three Nagas, Villa Santi and Tum Tum Cheng, with varying degrees of pleasure and disappointment. Villa Santi for all its style was slightly disappointing but the musicians playing traditional music (ended with Auld Lang Syne!) were a bonus. Lots of daytime delights of vegetable noodle soup in a pizza restaurant in the main street and treats from the bakeries. Great places to people watch - work teams where the women were doing more of the labouring than the men; tourists wandering around but the place didn’t feel overly crowded with tourists; virtually no begging – but there were some local characters; Vehicles arriving from outlying villages stuffed to the roof with women and their bags of things to sell at the night market.

As with the restaurants there are some very chic shops like Caruso Lao with its black and white ebony bowls and vases and the photo of Mick Jagger in the shop with the Canadian owner. A beautiful wooden heart from there turned up in my Christmas stocking! There are some good quality mulberry paper product places and we bought a few things from one young artist who had trained in art school in LP. The night market which sets up down one end of the main street holds all sorts of promise. There are definitely little treasures to be found there amongst all the mass-produced stuff. I particularly liked some little teapots, which have been fired to crack the glaze and give an antique effect. The sellers have an uncanny knack of spotting whatever scarf or trinket your eye may have rested on for a split second longer than the others and have it laid out for you to have a better look at under their lights. It is all so bright and colourful with many of the villagers in traditional dress. Unfortunately many of the clothes and bags seemed to be really badly made. Bartering is the order of the day – the children being as adept if not better than the adults. “buy one – no thank you – then buy two”

I tried out a few massage places including Garden Spa along the street from L’Elephant, which was a nice enough place but the massage was disappointing. In the end I opted for the shop front Lotus and some of the best massages of the trip there. $3 for a 1 hour Lao massage - 6$ for 2 hours. One or two of the staff were particularly skilled but like most of these places you get seen by whoever. I had intended trying out the Red Cross place but this place was so convenient, I could just wander back to the guest house through the wats.

On two consecutive days we took trips on the Mekong with a young man who kept his boat just below our breakfast restaurant. He slept on the boat with his wife and so she came along too. On the first day, not long after we headed off to the Pak Ou caves, we stopped at a village. Our boatman was enthusiastically greeted by a dog and then he returned with his young son who was also with us for the next day too. Very happy family. The Mekong is a fast flowing reddy brown river. There are all sorts of long narrow craft on the river – tiny ones for fishing with nets using empty plastic water bottles for floats - open ones for public ferry crossing to the other side – two sizes of tourist boats and large ones that look like long distance river buses. No big cargo boats as there is too little water. It’s not an easy river with a surprising number of rocks and sandbanks. We mainly hugged the shore during our one and a half hour trip to the caves – not a remarkable journey,but pleasant. At Pak Ou we had the place more or less to ourselves. There are thousands and thousands of Buddha images in the caves. Some almost eaten away with woodworm – some looking very recent. The second cave was much darker and we had to hire a torch, which turned out to be useless. Our digital camera revealed what we were peering at in the darkness!
We stopped at whisky, paper and weaving villages on the way back. ‘Whisky’ turned out to be distilled via old oil drums from fermented rice and seemed to be sold for drinking and also for effect in bottles with snakes, centipedes and scorpions pickled in it! We weren’t tempted to have a wee dram.
Our next trip was about one hour in the boat followed by about 20 minutes in a van to Tat Kuang Si waterfalls which were quite impressive but we didn’t get our kit off for a swim in any of the pools. On our return journey we stopped off at a pottery village which was obviously less frequented by tourists. We paid an entry fee on arrival, although it wasn’t clear what that was for – the very dilapidated wat? I suppose this was as close as we got to Lao village life and it looks hard. We didn’t stay long because we didn’t feel entirely comfortable looking round but we did see some kind of massive oven/kiln dug deep into the earth and sealed off with black smoke belching out of a hole in the ground (burning lorry tyres?) and very large pots being turned.

A trip to the top of Mount Phusi is a must with great views of Luang Prabang. At the bottom there are women selling offerings of flowers and incense and unfortunately a few women with tiny terrified captured birds in miniscule bamboo cages for sale to be released at the top for good fortune!

The Royal Palace is worth a visit. Again not remarkable, but an insight into more recent history. It’s well worth setting aside time to visit at least some of the many wats. I found the architecture to be a bit more interesting than that of some Thai temples

On our last day we took a trip across the river and walked along to the temples, and the cave, and up to the unused temple that you can see from LP. A great view from there but the place itself wasn’t as magical as it had looked from LP.

We were there for 8 days in all and it was a restful place to be in the middle of quite a full-on trip.



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Old Jan 18th, 2006, 10:27 AM
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Sorry folks - that's what happens when you post a late report! Heading should say 2005.
Gpanda - even I'm not that late!
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Old Jan 18th, 2006, 03:39 PM
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I'm glad you enjoyed LP. It's really a place you have to slow down to experience. We chatted a lot with the young monks and novices. There are few old monks because they were purged via the "re-education camps" by the Pathet Lao.

If you haven't read it, you'd enjoy "In Search of the Elephant Kings." I reaad it before going to LP, and it made me feel like I knew some of the people there
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Old Jan 18th, 2006, 04:20 PM
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Kathie,

Thanks for the book recommendation. I will look out for it. I read many of your threads before setting out on this trip and so there's a lot of your inspiration behind it.
Pleased you read my report. I wonder how many people will realise 2002 in the heading is an unfortunate typo!
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Old Jan 18th, 2006, 05:48 PM
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great report...looking forward to more segments...

LP is an interesting place....was 8 days too long??
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Old Jan 18th, 2006, 06:20 PM
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There is a second book (2003) by Christopher Kremmer called Bamboo Palace which follows up Stalking the Elephant Kings. (published by Harper Collins in the states.) It contains some material from the first book too but is well worth the read. As Kathie says you feel you actually know some of the people.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 01:47 AM
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rhkkmk,

As Kathie said, LP is a place where you have to slow down to experience. We had earmarked it as a place to have a bit of a breather in a longish trip. When we first arrived, I really wondered if we had made a mistake and this was not going to be the place to do that. Once we changed accommodation and I started to unwind, I really got into the rhythm of the place. Because in many ways there isn't that much to 'do' there, there is less pressure to be planning out your days to maximise time and see everything. As the days went by I realised that 8 days was not enough for me.
It's a personal thing and I think that for some people maybe 4 days would be more than enough to get a sense of the place and see what you wanted to see. However, if I went back I would want to spend at least a week there again.

MaryW,

Thanks for that recommendation. I'm hoping these books will be available in the UK.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 06:00 AM
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MaryW, thats for the recommendation of the second book. I'll have to look for it.

Kippy, I'm glad my information was helpful. Like you, I found a week to be a good amount of time in LP and would do it again!
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 09:16 AM
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Thanks for the atmospheric trip report.What did you think of Tum Tum Cheng? Did you try their cookery school? We were there for 8 days and we still did not see everything. We would go back tomorrow, given the chance.

Gill (and Tony).
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 10:21 AM
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Reading the heading, I initially thought that you were actually providing a belated trip report on a 3 1/2 year old adventure. My calculator only has 8 columns, so I'm glad I did not have to calculate the late penalty on that. I do note that you elected to post this in a separate posting rather than as an addendum to your BKK-SR report. This could begin an unfortunate trend towards clarity and must be nipped in the bud. Consequently, the fine will ahve to be multiplied by the square root of Pi.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 11:24 AM
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Gill and Tony,

We only ate at Tum Tum Cheng once and the meal consisted of one of the most divine aubergine dishes I have ever eaten. Unfortunately we also had a fish dish, which was inedible. I had looked into doing their cookery class but somehow never got round to it. I would definitely do that on a return visit and I know what you mean about not seeing everything!

Gpanda,

I seem to be cutting my fodors teeth with some difficulty, particularly with regard to headings. My previous heading meant that I couldn't continue in that thread and then managed to make the most unfortunate typo. I can assure you I wasn't trying the slip my increasingly delayed report in under an inaccurate heading in order to avoid the inevitable! I am trying to fulfil my contractural obligations before the most severe penalty clauses kick in.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 11:39 AM
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Following up on a previous post, would I be out of line to suggest that boxing yourself in by the title of your previous post might have resulted from your "old fashioned Scottish education". The quotes denote a previous statement and are not intended to convey irony.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 03:27 PM
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Gpanda,
How perceptive. One of the problems of being a pedant is that we are so busy paying attention to the small details that the bigger and more relevant things get neglected.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 03:58 PM
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Kippy - the book is published in UK by HarperCollins too - in Australia its under the "Flamingo" imprint - don't know whether they use that in UK or not.

It is probably more readily available here as the writer is Australian but it should be easy to get in UK - if you have any trouble let me know and I'll see what I can do.
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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 04:42 PM
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CHIANG MAI

Because Thai Airways cancelled their Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai route before we left the UK and that was the only direct flight operating on the day we chose to travel we had to make a convoluted and much more expensive journey of flying down to Bangkok and up to Chiang Mai spending the best part of the afternoon and evening instead of a one hour flight.

We were booked into Baan Orapin, which was going to involve a change of room for the last night in order for us to be able to stay. Our first room turned out to be a villa really, with two bedrooms upstairs and a large comfortable kitchen /living area downstairs. Opas, the owner came and settled us in and lent us maps and guidebooks. We headed straight out to eat and picked on the Goodview Restaurant along the road. It was absolutely packed out, mainly with young Thais who were crowded into, the bar area listening to a loud band with an impressive lead singer. I ordered a cocktail but was totally unprepared for the performance put on by the young girl shaker at our table!

Our first day in Chiang Mai was just spent wandering. We walked across a footbridge into town and headed for the Lanna Cultural Centre. It didn’t hold much other than some intricate dioramas. We headed for a huge brick chedi, which we had noticed. There was a big celebration being held there in honour of the birthday of an important monk and a VIP was expected. There were stall holders who insisted on giving us and everyone else there, free food. We had soup, tea, icecream, fruit and were thanked for coming! There were palm readers and astrologers with young monks queuing up for readings – quite a party atmosphere with a junior brass band. We never found out who the dignitary was as we headed of to Wat Phra Singh where we found an initiation going on – men of all ages, not boys, having their heads shaved by other monks or by friends and family. We returned later to find that they had were all now in white robes, awaiting a ceremony to be given their actual monks robes.

In the evening we had our first taste of the night market. Spent time looking at the artists in the indoor night market doing mainly portraits from photos and when they haven’t commissions seem to do Hendrix or Marley or tribal people. For the first time really, I realised why people recommend that you don’t bring too much with you because I saw so many things that I wanted to buy. Luggage restrictions definitely curbed things a bit. We passed MacDonalds, Starbucks and Subway. Evening meal at the Riverside, which was another absolutely huge restaurant with a band, great food, reasonable prices and almost impossible to get a table mid-evening.

We had booked Poon for an early start to go to Lampang to the Elephant Conservation Centre and we were whisked off in her lovely old Mercedes. Lampang is nearly 80 Kilometers from town, but somehow before we knew it we were there. Poon has a VIP pass and so she could drive us into the Centre. We stopped on the way to see elephant dung being processed into paper – great vats of it being boiled before the pulp was extracted (maybe that is too much information!) It was all very low key, not a mass production of products like at Pinnewala in Sri Lanka. We bought some Christmas cards, which, if truth be told, smelled a bit authentic when I was posting them out on our return! We had such fun feeding some of the baby elephants; watched them being bathed by their mahouts; saw the show which I could really have done without but seemed to be a major attraction especially amongst the Thai visitors and visited the hospital area. The best bit for me was visiting the other hospital which was run by I think the Friends of the Asian Elephant which was an impressive set up. There were two baby elephants, sisters who had been walking along the road with their mother and had stood on a landmine. The staff were doing their utmost to help these injured and distressed young elephants. Unfortunately, they were not the only landmine victims there.

On the way back to CM we drove to Doi Suthep, which seems to be of important religious significance. We climbed the steps with long dragon handrails but there was also some kind of funicular to the top where there were golden stupas dazzling in the sunshine . We got blessed by a monk and still have the cotton cords around our wrists. We found Poon waiting for us by an elephant, which was used to make money for the temple. It was the end of its day and after it was untethered it climbed over the railings so carefully and delicately. We followed it down the road to the stalls lining the street to the car park. It stopped while stall-holders brought out loads of food for it. One woman gave it a basket of sweet potatoes which it handed back empty to get refilled. This was obviously the highlight of the day for the elephant.

Puphing Palace was closed by the time we left Doi Suthep and we opted to drive up to what turned out to be a very touristy Hmong village where a young man tried to sell us tiger penis. He seemed to think that telling us it came from Burma made it ok. I would like to think that whatever it was that he was trying to sell us was nothing to do with a tiger.

We had one more day in Chiang Mai which was spent shopping, mainly in the street along from Baan Orapin and in the lovely local market just over the footbridge where you could buy anything from dried bamboo worms to gaudy Buddha images with flashing lights; visiting the quaint museum in Wat Gate which had all manner of exhibits with little presentation; and me having a spa pampering session at Oasis Spa which was just the BEST. As it was Sunday, there was the walking market. One of the main streets becomes closed to traffic and stalls set up, some selling more of the same stuff as the night market, but there were many more craft type stalls and some more interesting things than we had seen elsewhere. Also there were more local people than tourists. There were buskers for charities and children playing musical instruments, food areas almost as much an event as a market.

Meals were at Good Earth, mainly Chinese/Thai Vegetarian, The Gallery for lunches and The Riverside, which was our favourite restaurant for location, food and ambience. Baan Orapin was better than I could have wished for and our change of room was neither too disruptive nor a disappointment.

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Old Jan 19th, 2006, 04:48 PM
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Kippy - thanks for the trip report, belated though it was. (Just kidding, just kidding.) I very much enjoyed it.
Do you remember how much you paid for the boat trip to Pak Ou? Ditto for going to Kuang Si waterfalls? I'd like to have a ballpark figure in mind when we hire a boat.
We have that corner room reserved at Sayo in February! I can't wait!
Karen
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Old Jan 20th, 2006, 04:22 AM
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MaryW,

Thanks - I've checked with Amazon Uk and they have it in stock. I'm sure I will enjoy it.

Althom1122,

Our recollection for the cost of boat to Pak Ou was $23 and to the waterfall was $22. We also paid the van driver $5 to take us on the 20 minute journey to the falls. We didn't barter as the prices seemed reasonable. You can get to the falls just by road, but I don't know how much that costs or how long it takes. I imagine it would be considerably cheaper and a quicker way of getting there. We just wanted to get see what it was like up river but if going again we would probably opt to go by road because the journey wasn't any more interesting than going to Pak Ou. The actual journey time was about an hour and half to get Pak Ou because we were going against the current. The journey time back would have been quicker but we made several stops on the way back and one way or another spent quite a bit of time in the villages. If you decide to go on either of these trips I would recommend that you opt to go early in the day - particularly with the falls. On our journey back to the boat we passed one van after another, full of people. The other thing, I had read in one of Kathie's threads, is to take a light jacket or at least have long sleeves on the river. I forgot and it was a wee bit chilly. Also take water and something to eat with you, as you will be gone a while.
I hope that you enjoy the Sayo Guesthouse as much as we did. It was the only original building that we stayed in on the whole trip. Apart from the addition of an ensuite bathroom with a mezzanine level above, the room is pretty much how it would have been and so light and airy. There is a lovely mahogany table, but otherwise the furnishings are fairly basic. The room has no pretentions but is full of character.
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Old Jan 20th, 2006, 10:33 AM
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Kippy-most kidding aside, this is a super report. It flows smoothly. Did you take extensive notes? Did you write in a journal? Or do you have an idetic memory? fellow pedants want to know.
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Old Jan 20th, 2006, 11:37 AM
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Gpanda,

Thanks. We were in the habit of making brief notes of things we would like to remember but often days after they'd happened! The same principle as this report, really, but on a shorter time scale. We also used our digital cameras as a back up for our own memories which are less reliable these days!
The final part of this report should appear any day now.
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Old Jan 20th, 2006, 12:20 PM
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Am I to believe that there is to be a Part 3 to this report? The fine will be incalculable. Maybe, I'll compute the fine in pounds so it won't seem so high.

Our solution to detailing our report (as if Beth would deign to write one) is to jump on the internet while on holiday. This allows for impressions as well as facts. I've found that the impressions are much more fleeting.
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