English version: Luang Prabang

Dear Family and friends,

We hope all is well, we thought it was time to tell you about our amazing week in Luang Prabang. After a very chilled out month in our great apartment in Chiang Mai it was time to leave Thailand for our next destination Laos! We had to take a slight detour to get to Luang Prabang flying over Bangkok but luckily it was only 2 short 1-hour flights. Luang Prabang is one of our highlights so far, let me tell you about our week.

We arrived on Thursday and checked into the Jasmine Hotel which is pretty much in the city center. Relatively tired from the travels we ventured out onto the night market in search for some nice food, we sat down at a nice steak place and ordered some beers and a steak! After dinner we moved over to the bar next door for a nice couple of glasses of wine (decent Riesling) as we sat there the owner informed us that Laos has a curfew, basically everything is closed after 23:00, this probably still has something to do with the fact that Laos is still communistic. So at 23:15 we down the last bit of our wine and head back to the hotel. Upon arrival at the lobby there are 4 somewhat intoxicated Irish girls ready to go out, we start chatting and the tells us they're going "out out" and yes they knew about the curfew, the explain to us that there's 1 venue outside of the city that's open until 02:00, without hesitation we jump in with them in the tuk tuk and start driving. In the 15 min journey we stopped about 4 times in hunt for Nutella pancakes, and at 1 stop one of the girls tries to start the tuk tuk and drive off, haha you gotta love the Irish. After some time we arrive.... it's a bowling alley! I kid you not it's a flippin BOWLING ALLEY!!! Hahaha, we enter and there's roughly 200 backpackers inside drinking and you guessed it bowling. We walk up to the bar and order a bottle of Vodka and a bottle of sprite for about 5 quid, haha love this place already. We steadily drink all the vodka, and after about 3 bottles the lights go on, and it's time to go home, our tuk tuk driver who waited outside for us provides a safe journey home.

Friday, hangover day, the 5 quid bottles of Vodka did their work last night, and the following morning, looks like we won't be doing anything today!

Saturday, hangover is gone and we venture out into the city, we wander and get lost in the beautiful city center of Luang Prabang, great temples, lot's of French architecture and all and all just a lot of piece and quiet. At around 16:00 and 10k of walking we have our minds set on going to the place called "Utopia" right next to the Mekong river, it's mentioned everywhere, Lonely Planet and every blog you can find....however this is not the reason for going, as a lot of you may know my sister spend a year in South East Asia last year, and also went to Utopia. Now  once she was there she told the staff she was a famous Dutch Dj, now don't get me wrong she can play some good tunes but very famous is kind of an overstatement;) She actually DJ'd their a few nights which we read about on her blog so you can see we had to see the place for ourselves. Utopia is cool, with Yoga classes in the morning, massive lounge area's in the afternoon and at night the place comes alive with a DJ and loads of people. We had a great time there, still kind of surreal to think that we're in the same place as my sister and her boyfriend were not even a year ago.

Sunday we wake up and have breakfast in the hotel, in the afternoon we chill out at Utopia again with a good book in their lounge area, really a very chilled place. We have to get up really early the next day so we call it an early night.

Monday, beeep beeep beeep the alarm rings and it 5 in the morning, god this is early. We shower get dressed and walk over to the Main Street of Luang Prabang, we're about to witness something spectacular! The Alms ceremony, basically around 300 Buddhist Monks leave their temple at sunrise to walk the streets collecting food from the local people. It's an absolutely beautiful thing to witness, all orange robed monks turn the street bright orange as the walk in a meditative state to collect, after reading up on it, for the local people it's their chance to give back and earn some mega karma points. The only downside of the spectacle is as always the tourists... there are rules to the whole ceremony for us rules like, don't be involved in the giving, stay 5 meters away at all times, and don't use flash photography, as always all of the mainly Chinese tourists don't live by these rules making it quite upsetting for the local Laos people. After the ceremony we chill out at this local French bakery for a couple of hours because we enlisted ourselves to a full day of teaching English in the Laos countryside at a local school. After a short drive we arrive at the school, where there are around 100 kids, from ages ranging 4-20, first we start off with the youngest of the lot, singing, dancing, and just having fun all in English, after that we engage with about 10 twenty year old kids in conversation talking about their lives, and helping them with pronunciation and grammar. Once we're done at 16:00 we get a big send off from everyone and drive back. Extremely tired we sit down at a local terrace and have some beers and some food. We're in bed at 22:00 vast a sleep.

Tuesday we wake up and grab some breakfast, we swim and get ready for our next adventure, we're going to the very famous Khang Si waterfalls! We get picked up at the hotel by a minivan and after about an hour drive we arrive. First up a bear sanctuary where they're keeping around 20 brown bears that have been mistreated by poachers, kinda cool to see. Little walk to the waterfall and it is enormous and very layered, we walk all the way to the top to witness some of Mother Nature's amazing power, we swim in the waterfall, and after about 3 hours it's time to head back. In the evening we grab some dinner and get back at about 23:00 just before curfew;)

All in all this completes our week in Luang Prabang, and besides the curfew, it's an amazing place to visit, the atmosphere is just amazing! Tomorrow we're off for another 8 days in Laos but we move on to the capital Vientiane.

Hope you enjoyed the blog and don't forget to check out the pictures!

Speak soon, Nadine & Bas