Day Twelve - Hotel Vangsavath

Today, we jumped on our short flight from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang.  Our aircraft was a petite turbo-prop number, carrying some fifty souls.  Despite the flight only lasting an hour, the indefatigable cabin crew still managed to load us, stow us, instruct us on aircraft safety, water us, feed us a sumptuous banquet (see below), offer us dazzling trinkets from duty-free and offload us, all in that short time. I think they do two or three return flights a day, so they must be knackered at the end of their shifts.

My sumptuous meal.

Laos is a single-party socialist republic (hammer and sickle flags aplenty), following a long civil war ending in victory for the Pathet Lao in 1975. It is a mountainous land, bordered by Vietnam to the East, Thailand to the West, Cambodia to the South and Burma and China to the North-West. Much of its income is derived from hydro-electric schemes on its many rivers, selling power to its neighbours.

Its people are a mix of ethnic groups with the Lao people forming a 60% majority and other tribal communities like the Hmong  and various Mon-Khmer people forming the remainder. 

Luang Prabang (LP hereafter) is the old capital, replaced by Vientiane in 1520 to avoid a Burmese invasion. We'd decided to visit after friends had said that, if they could revisit just one of their previous holiday destination, it would be LP. Our taxi drive from the little airport revealed none of its charms, just dusty roads with loads of Lao people on motorbikes, tin-roofed shops and street vendors selling nameless fruit and vegetables.  Our Hotel Vangsavath was quite nice though - a mother and son operation, in an old teak-built mansion with our room having its own verandah overlooking a stagnant pond. We'd started the Malarone tablets, however, as a prophylactic against malarial infections so we weren't too bothered.

Hotel Vangsavath at night

We caught the hotel's motorised tuk-tuk (a sort of larger rickshaw with four rows of bench seats and open sides, all the better for you to leap from if the local helter-skelter traffic got too terrifying) into town which was about a mile and a half away. The main street is transformed at dusk each evening into one large night market selling local wares, some food but mostly garments. Beyond the market - and it seems huge on first sight - the road opens up into a parade of restaurants, currency exchanges and trip/trek vendors. Then you can turn left down into the historic district that stretches out along the Mekong's banks, or you can turn right to find the trendier bars down by LP's other river, the Nam Khan.  We settled for a fairly brief outing and promised ourselves a fuller exploration of the town's attractions tomorrow.

Lao beer is very good by the way. Here is one I spotted earlier this evening. Maybe I will try one before the end of our week here.