Luang Prabang & Kuang Si Falls

After the second day on the slow boat we arrived in Luang Prabang. The city is in Northern Laos and was once the former capital of the whole country. Now it is a "World Heritage City" and if you walked through the streets you would see why. Laos was colonised by the French and you can defiantly tell in Luang Prabang. The architecture of the city is very French inspired. In 1989 when Laos was reopened to tourism the colonial mansions were restored in to guest houses and hotels. Even with the buildings so nice the prices for the hostels were still pretty cheap.

The place I stayed at was 25000 kip a night ($3) but some of the Villa's along the river were a lot more expensive.

Tree under which we ate lunch one day

Every night they closed down the main street from about 7-10 and had a very nice night market. People sold all sorts of arts and handicrafts. Lots of clothes as well. I bought some pants with the lowest crotch i have ever seen (thats how they do it here). They had lots of baby clothes and baby shoes too.

If you cut down a little ally on the left you find yourself in a row of 10000 kip plate buffet's ($1.25). So we went there a couple times and stuffed ourselves full. Like Huay Xai there was lots and lots of places selling sandwiches. And sandwiches can be good but you cant eat them all the time. Stands in Luang Prabang also sell smoothies, which you can drink at any time and we bought a lot of them. 

Most of the town is right along the Mekong river

I really liked the way they do it because they have a whole bunch of plastic cups filled with different combinations of fruit in them stacked up. So you can pick which cup you want and hand it to them and they will blend it up exactly how you want it. 

The other thing that they have a lot of were tuk-tuks. Not like Thailand tuk-tuk's though. These ones were more like a pick up truck and they didnt try to take you to gem stores or suit places which was a nice change. But everywhere you went they called "cave tour, waterfall, cheap cheap for you".

One day we decided to go to one of the waterfalls to see what it was all about. 

The Kuang Si falls were pretty sweet. They are an hour outside town by tuk-tuk and we paid 100000 split between 4 people so 25000 each. And that was for him to drive us there, wait till we were done and drive us back to town. After we negotiated a price he said "secret!". There were two other girls in the tuk tuk that i guess paid 100000 each because the price is normally 200000 per group. So those girls got ripped off. When we got to the falls it was 20000 ($2.50) to get it and you got access to the bear rescue centre on the way. 

Bears werent too exciting cause they just ate so they were lying around mostly. Walking up the path a bit more you went into a forest and there were a whole bunch of little streams going through the trees. Then you come to the main swimming areas were there are giant blue pools where there was barely anyone swimming in them.

 We decided to walk all the way up to the top before going swimming.

 At the top there was a giant water fal and lots of old people picnicking. After taking a couple pictues we went back down to the swimming pools. The higher pool had a waterfall going into it and a rope swing on the tree overhanging.

 Rope swing was really fun and never seemed to get old. Jumping off the falls was also super fun too because the water below was super deep. There were also some sort of fish in the water too that would bite at peoples toes and really seemed to like scabs. After a while hanging out there we decided to head back to town because it was getting busier.

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