Vientianne and Luang Prabang - Laos

The more time we spend here and the more we travel around Laos, the more we fall in love with this exquisite country. When we were in Tibet it felt like we were in another place and another time and that feeling has returned here in Laos. Time has stood still here in Laos and with it's stillness kept all it's beauty, tradition, culture and spirituality. Vientiane, the capital, is unlike any other capital city I have been in before. It is very calm and easy going and more of a provincial town than a capital city. We spent our days there walking around the beautiful Wats (Buddhist temples), sitting on the banks of the Mekong watching the sun set and drinking the most delicious Lao coffee. A small city, it was just nice to walk around and enjoy the quite calmess of the city (a contradiction in itself).
And then we took the bus to the UNESCO city of Luang Prabang. We had been told ever since we entered Asia that this was one of the most beautiful places to see and if the bus ride was anything to go by, it seemed that what we had been told was all true. The 8 hour bus ride through winding mountain roads was had breathtaking landscapes all the way. Green, lush mountains and valleys, small villages along the way and always in the background a beautiful vista of the lines formed by the mountain range. We have now been in Luang Prabang for 4 idyllic days and are in no rush to leave this beautiful untouched corner of the world. We feel extremely lucky and even more priviledged to be here. Times are moving very quickly for this country and especially for this city and I think a few more years and the magic of this place will be completely captured and lost in the tourism that is slowly creeping up. There are plans to extend the exsisting airport so that boeings can land. Need I say more. At the moment it is a cultural and religious place. A small city set surrounded by mountains and with the Mekong running through it. You sit at a roadside cafe and there a motorbike will pass by every 2 minutes instead of a continuos stream of hundreds of them. Bicycles are the nexy big form of transport. Cars are rare and the ones that we do see are brand new and very recently acquired. There are no buses or trucks or anything like that. We were told that 2 years ago even motorbikes were rare and if you sat at a local cafe you'd see one pass by every half an hour. It is a place where time stands still. Mornings start very early, we have been up at 5:30 in the mornings to give alms to the monks with the locals, and the city sleeps early too.
This is what life is like here for me....A day in Luang Prabang......
5:30a.m --- sit on the pavement with all the locals with a basket of sticky rice or a bag of sweets and wait as the monks leave all the wats and walk along in a line passing us and collecting their food for the day. We are blessed everyday and cannot think of a better way to start the day.
6:00 --- back to bed for a few hours...
8:30 ---breakfast at a local cafe.....as we sit there drinking delicious Lao coffee with freshly baked warm baguettes, we watch the monks walking by, with umbrellas to shade them from the sun, going to school, parents bringing their children, dressed in uniforms that keep with the traditional dress,to school, on motorbikes.
9:30 ----walk into town and we watch as people start the day setting up food stalls to sell noodle soup with fresh salad, lemon and red hot chillies, baguette with pate, sticky rice and chicken.......women steaming rice in big baskets on charcoal fires, boiling big pots of long, white noodles.....and then as we walk some more there are home industries.......women sitting at home with piles of steaming hot salty rice pressing it into bamboo rings and leaving there out to dry to make rice cakes......women sitting there gossiping and stitching detailed traditional patterns and landscapes on tapestries and bags and cushion covers to sell at the night market for the few tourists who are lucky enough to be here
11:00 ----- It's saturday and we have taken a tuk tuk to a suburb 10 minutes out of townto watch a cock fight. It's a small brick ring built in someone's backyard surrounded by men waiting for the fight to begin. The two cocks are being cleaned and prepared by their owners in one corner and then it is time to place them in the rink. slowly you can feel the tempo rising, the excitement and the testerone building up. We could stay and watch 6 more fights but noodle soup is calling and we will come back tomorrow for a bit more excitement.
12:30 ---- sit on low stools and eat the hot and freshly prepared noodle soup with a squeeze of lemon in it and a few red hot chillies t o give it an added kick. To calm our burning mouths.....a delicious fresh fruit shake made from mangoes, bananas, pineapples, dragon fruit, papaya.....
1:20 ---we catch the local bus to the Kuang-si waterfall...an hour later we are there enjoying the crystal clear waters. We sit under the falls surrounded by lush green vegetion and with only a few locals to keep us company and share their picnic with us.
5:00 -- It starts to get cold and we grab our scarves and jumpers from the hotel, walk around to the Wat, talk to a few monks who are always ready and willing....they like to practise their english, at times in the smaller wats we sit with them for the evening prayer and just get taken away by the sound of their beautiful voices singing and chanting..
7:30 --- a quick walk around the local market as the local sit there wrapped up from the cold selling silk scarves and bags and various other traditional items. As they wait for someone to come and spend a few kips, they sit there hand making the items they are selling......embroidering, carving....
8:00 --- a dinner of Lap...local soup ..at the Cafe's along the Mekong and after a few Lao beers...it's an early night as the city itself shuts down and everyones goes to bed early on these cold nights.

We drink Lao coffee, explore the Wats, talk to the monks, walk around, go outside town to explore the area around and generaly just fall into the pace of life that exsists here. Time stands still or passes slowly and with it we feel like we have entered another world that will very soon in a few years disappear.