As orange as always

We stayed a few days in Luang Prabang, went cycling, went to some beautiful turquoise waterfalls and had a fancy hot-pot by the river.  We even saw a “ballet”, though it was a far stretch of the word!

After Luang Prabang we headed south to Vang Vieng.  Vang Vieng is a terribly touristy town.  It’s the Asian Ibiza… there’s one bar showing Family Guy all day, another showing Friends (apparently they haven’t changed this the last 2 years…), and in between lots of stumbling drunk tourists… Yugh!  But if you rent a moped and get up at 6am, you can get away from all that and see some amazing caves and limestone landscape.  On the way back to the city we got a flat tyre just 50m after a moped repair shop… what a coincidence… in any case, they repaired it pretty quick, and we still got the local bus on to Vientianne.  We just stayed the night in Vientianne, and crossed the Friendship Bridge back to Thailand and a few hours later were at Pak Chong.  Surprise surprise – hardly a tourist in site, and we were caught off guard suddenly off the beaten trail and having to go out looking for a place to sleep rather than fend off a hoard of Tuk-Tuk drivers trying to get a commission off us.

We spent 3 days in Khao Yai National Park – that was a real highlight of the trip  Hardly any tourists, and lots of animals and jungle all for us.  Of course all the leeches were after us too, but after we got ourselves a pair of “leech socks” we had a great time wandering through lonely jungle paths and finding exotic insects!

After Khao Yai we went back to Bangkok and had a final couple of days to do some shopping and see the sites we had missed before.  The conflict with the Red Shirts put a damper on our activities.  It was odd to be so close to the conflict that the tear gas made us cough (and we thought the shots were fire crackers till we heard the news), but as a tourist pretty much outside and irrelevant to what was going on.

Here’s the pictures and a map of the rest of our trip from Luang Prabang back to Bang Kok:

Center of map

Route

Tags: thailand asia jungle

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 06:44 and is filed under By Robin, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.