We flew from Siem Reap to Luang Prabang because we had heard horror stories of the horrific roads in Laos and didn’t really want to spend 3 days travelling the length of it to get to the central part! Liam was extremely excited to be getting on another plane, like a big kid, even more so when he saw that we were getting on a propeller plane. I on the other hand couldn’t have thought of anything worse to go on! It looked like a battered old little plane and when Liam started bringing up statistics showing that this plane isn’t even acknowledged by American or European safety standards it didn’t exactly put my fears to rest! The taking off was the worst, it was so noisy and rattly and because the plane was so small we had to have a rest stop halfway and therefore take off twice!
Of course we arrived safe and sound with no hitches in Luang Prabang! The city is really quite small and I would compare it more to a town, yet it was a really nice place to wander around. We got a really good vibe straight away from Laos, it’s so chilled out, we didn’t have children begging or tuk tuk drivers and shop owners pestering us at all! It was bliss!
The main attractions in Luang Prabang were the many Buddhist temples, they are everywhere and we seemed to walk past one every 2 minutes! As usual the rain was an ever-present factor of our days, it just seems to be following us everywhere we go! We didn’t let it dampen our spirits and to be honest we just used it as an excuse to go and chill out at the bars!
On an evening the place seemed to come to life as the night market pops up on the main street. The street is 
unrecognisable from where we walked during the day as the full length of it is covered by hundreds of stalls selling little trinkets, clothes and all-sorts of other pretty things! Honestly if we could buy souvenirs I would have been in shopping heaven in this little market, yet I had to make do with just buying our usual bracelet memento that we get in every country we visit!
Getting to our next destination of Vang Vieng from Luang Prabang was definitely full of the usual mis-haps of our Asian journeys! We booked a minivan to take us down there, there were 11 of us piled in as well as all of the backpacks which were kindly piled next to my head! The roads in Laos are definitely some of the worst we have been on! We had a few near misses as their were tons of landslides on the mountain roads due to it being rainy season. Then we got held up for about 30 minutes due to a digger clearing a landslide from the middle of the road. The size of the rocks it was moving was pretty scary, they could have quite easily come down on us! Luckily the views made it worthwhile and after an 8 hour journey (which according to Google maps should have taken 2 1/2!), we arrived safely in Vang Vieng!
WanderGina 