Cool info. I won't have time to do motorcycle trip you're taking about since I'm only there for 7 days.
I've seen Sakura Bar and Viva Pub being mentioned quite a bit in my research. Have been to the bars where they sell shrooms? I'm wondering if I can go to any bar and they have it on the menu. I'd worried about cops since I know it's technically illegal.
How is the area around Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang? You can rent a motorbike and just explore right?
I guess my most pressing concern is transportation. I assume the taxis and tuk tuks will try to rip you off. Was it easy to get to and from the airports and bus stations? How were the rides from one city to another?
I ended up buying a flight from Luang Prabang to Vientiane because I didn't want to miss my flight and I wanted some time to explore the city.
I'm going there to get away from Koreans.
What nationality did you see the most of? I'm expecting to see a bunch of European backpackers. Hoping to meet some Spanish chicks and put my studying into practice.
I went in July which is the low tourism season. When I was in Luang Namtha, Muang Sing and Oudom Xai I practically was the only white person. I remember going on a guided jungle trek in Muang Sing and the only other people on it were this retired couple from France in their late sixties and their granddaughter who was about 14 years old. They didn’t speak any English and kept trying to speak French to the locals. I think they were operating under a presumption that French was still widely spoken in Laos as it used to be part of French Indochina along with Vietnam and Cambodia, which it isn’t. Being Canadian I have some minimal French so I had to help translate.
Luang Prabang is very quaint and relaxing. If you go try to check out the Kuang Si falls and go for a swim. Luang Prabang is hard to describe, but it’s lovely. It’s like if South East Asia tried to do a small mountain town along the lines of Banff or Aspen.
When I went to Vang Vieng I think it must have still been in full swing and not slowed down because they had the tubing from one tree house bar to another and there were at least a dozen you could go to. They must have scaled it back due to fatalities because conceptually its very dangerous, especially when I was there during the rainy season. In the dry season it’s supposed to take a couple of hours to float from the drop off point to the last bar. In the rainy season it only takes half an hour. If you’re drunk out of your mind obviously it is very dangerous.
Vientiane is the only place that actually felt like a “city” but even then it’s small, like a quarter million people or so, and no big buildings to speak of. I really only went there in order to catch a flight to Hanoi.
Transportation from one town to another is slow. Taking a bus from Muang Sing to Luang Prabang took two full days to basically travel 200km. Ridiculous, but the topography is all jungle covered mountains. I never flew other than from Vientiane to Hanoi on Vietnam airlines. I had heard that Laos airlines had a poor safety record and I wasn’t interested in dying in a crash in the jungle so I never even considered flying between cities within Laos.
I never made it to the south part of Laos. I was cautioned that it wasn’t as safe, that land mines and other unexplored ordinance was a real problem all over the country side. But there’s a place in south Laos called Four Thousand Islands that I didn’t make it to that I heard is great.
Why did I love Laos the most of all the countries in SE Asia that I visited?
1. The people are genuinely friendly. Everyone in Thailand is friendly, but I don’t think it’s genuine at all. The Thai people are friendly the same way that the locals are friendly in tourist hot spots in Mexico. They just want you to spend your money on them. In Laos it seems more “from the heart”, it’s not a fake smile to get you to lower your guard and open your wallet.
2. It’s exotic. I rented a bike in Luang Namtha and explored the area outside of town. It’s all bamboo huts and rice paddies. In town, you’ve got chickens and hogs freely roaming. It’s like something out of national geographic. There’s nothing modern about it at all. The county doesn’t even have street lights, so it’s very dark wondering around at night, you have to be careful where you walk.
3. It’s more off the beaten path. Everybody and their Lady Boy friend has been to Bangkok, Phucket or Ko Samui. Not as many people go to Laos. It’s the true “adventure”. The only place that would probably give it a run for it’s money would be Myanmar which I regret not visiting when I had the chance.
