Luang Prabang

Laos, and Luang Prabang in particular, are places I have long wanted to visit. We made it these holidays and we were very excited to be going.

The old town part of Luang Prabang is a world heritage area. Having been to Hoi An in Vietnam, I was interested to see how the area had coped with 20 years of being listed as a world heritage area.

Our hotel was the Belle Rive, which looks over the Mekong River. It is three beautiful old buildings, with lots of teak. The furniture, floors and trims were all teak. It was situated in the old part of town which meant we could pretty much walk everywhere.

It was the hottest part of the year which meant the temperatures were hitting the high 30s/low 40s during the afternoon. The evenings and mornings were quite chilly, dropping down to around 15. Basically we spent the mornings out visiting temples and other places, had lunch then went back to the hotel to chill out in the air conditioning until the late afternoon.

The temples in Luang Prabang look superficially like Thai temples. However the colours and decorations were a little more subtle as opposed to the garish colours in Thailand.

The temples are all working temples in that they have monks living there. Every morning there is something of a procession, as the monks walk through the streets to collect alms from the townspeople. What is kind of sad is that it has become a scene of conflict between the monks, townspeople and tourists. It's to the point where there are signs in lots of places asking that people be respectful towards the monks.

The other thing about our trip was the haze. March and April are when the farmers burn off the rice stubble left behind after harvesting. Because was hotter and drier than usual, the haze was horrendous, consistently sitting over 100 on the PSI scale. This was another reason to chill out in the hotel in the afternoon as the haze became worse as the day wore on. It was a shame, because the countryside would have really beautiful in clearer weather.

Perhaps one positive of the hot, dry weather is that the bougainvillea were flowering strongly. Which made for very colourful scenes along the streets and pleased Matilda no end.

I should point out that I started writing this post in April and as usual, didn't get around to finishing it. So now that I have started again, I can't really remember exactly what I was going to say. Never mind. Anyhoo, here are some more photos of Luang Prabang's old town. Enjoy:)