Friday 22nd June – Luang Prabang
The last couple of days have been quite hectic here in Luang Prabang.
Friday was a fairly easy day, where I managed to post my last journal entries and upload my photos. That ate up most of the day. In the evening the olf gang met up; me, Lisa, Francois, Laura, John, Jo, Amelia and Eddy, an Australian guy that John and Laura met at Luang Prabang Airport.
We headed out to Hive bar to see where the action was at. When we arrived at about 5pm it was not open yet, so we headed next door to the Lao Lao Garden. We had some food there and a few local cocktails. The local drink in Lao is Lao Whiskey, or Lao Lao as it is commonly called. This is a spirit made from sticky rice and is generally 50% by volume. I actually quite liked the “welcome drink” that we were given when we first arrive, which is a shot of some flavoured Lao Lao. Not everybody agreed with me! We sampled a few of the local cocktails. Which are pretty similar to the cocktails of the same name back home, only here they are made with Lao Lao. As expected these went down quite well. For some reason I just couldn’t get drunk that night. I had drunk plenty, but I think a combination of the heat and tiredness, my body just refused to give in the alcohol and kept me at quite a low energy for most of the evening. I think everyone else was pretty tired as well as it was all fairly tame. At about 9pm Sergio (the Chilean guy we had met a few days ago) told us that the thermometer on his watch was reporting that the temperature was 33degrees! Yup.. 33degrees at 9pm!
That just goes to show how hot the sun is during the peak part of the day. It must easily be reaching the late 40s in the sun. And it shows. Everywhere you go the Laos people are operating almost in slow motion. People sit around in their shops, and there is almost always someone asleep. Even when we are walking around town at this time sweat is just streaming out of your pours. You are constantly drenched. And after walking for a few minutes, you have to stop and take a rest. The heat is just an absolute killer, as is the humidity, which makes everything so much harder to deal with. I am quite surprised at myself though. Normally, in this kind of heat I just find it so unbearable that I am too uncomfortable to do anything and I cannot normally bear it. Although, out here, I am dealing with it pretty well. Whether it is the fact that I have acclimatised to the weather over the last few weeks, or I am just dealing with it better than I used to, I am unsure.
Whatever the reason, I am glad. It means I can make the most of my trip without constantly moaning that it is too hot, or just wanting to sit in some air conditioning. In fact, before Ania left I was planning on moving to an air-con room to make the evenings a bit more bearable. For some reason, my room feels a few degrees warmer than outside!
However, after she left, I decided that, actually, it is not too bad with just a fan. And it isn’t even a great fan in the room. A ceiling fan doesn’t appear to offer as much air movement or coolness as a smaller caged fan that moves as it spins. I decided to stay in my fan room and suck it up. It actually makes it a lot easier to go outside as well. If the room is so much colder than outside, as soon as you walk out into the heat it just hits you and you start sweating. By being more acclimatised in my room, it makes the heat outside a lot easier to deal with.
So, back to the Lao Lao garden. We drank up and cleared the bill. That came to a staggering 265,000kip. That is a quite a few Beerlao’s and cocktails for about 10 people.
And doing a quick conversion, our entire bill was around £35. The numbers on the notes here are just huge and it takes a while to get used to it! I am just starting to get a feel for the currency here, and don’t have to convert back to Baht, Pound or Dollar any more.
We moved on to the Hive Bar, at about 10:30pm, to see what was going on, and that place had really picked up. We found ourselves a table by the door and ordered some more drinks. I was still pretty tired, or chilled, I can’t seem to tell the difference any more, so the conversation in our group was fairly relaxed, even though the party was really going on around us. As soon as we sat down at our table we were sweating like pigs! It was one hot place. Fortunately we found another table not long after that had a fan facing directly on it, so we moved over there and instantly we all had a lot more energy!
Lesson 1, find a table indoors with a fan on it. Not long after we arrived a couple of familiar faces walked in the door. During our trip from the Laos border to Luang Prabang I met a couple of girls who were travelling together called Laura, from Toronto, Canada, and Renata, from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Renata recognised me and I waved them to come join us. At this point, my energy did manage to pick up quite a bit and we all had a great chat. In Laos, the law says that all persons have to be at their registered address of residency at midnight. Apparently this law is loosely enforced for individuals and tourists, but any business owners who serve past this time face large penalties, loss of license and possible incarceration, so they are pretty prompt at midnight to close up and send you home. There is a place open late night in Luang Prabang, and this is where everyone carts off to after the main bars close. And this place is a bowling alley of all things! We all decided that we were a bit too tired to keep going, so everyone headed back to their respective guest houses, I walked back to the river with Renata and Laura, since they lived in the same area as me. They are nice girls, but CRAZY!! They makes me laugh so much!!
I am not sure what the girls are doing in the morning, but the rest of us have decided to head off to the waterfall tomorrow. We have heard great things about it. It is meant to be pretty stunning and there are a couple of swimming areas. I am so looking forward to dipping into a nice cold pool after all this heat!