What a view from the hotel in the morning. I woke up at about 5:30am and just stared at the activity on the river. Pak Beng is definitely a "transit town". The locals seem to treat most people like they'll never see them again, a kind of one-night-stand service attitude. Oh well, I guess it's true - we won't be back.
We took the opportunity to get some math homework done. It's not exactly like pulling teeth to get them started, but once they get started, they each have different patterns. Abby tends to want to plot through the units, and she did well today...
Robin, shall we say, takes her time, though she did manage to get through a unit or two today.
In fact, Robin got much more lip syncing done than Math today....
The food was really good on the boat, but Beth and I agreed that we could use a change of pace tonight.
In the afternoon, Robin had a bit of a fever, so she laid down and actually slept for two hours.
On the way to Luang Prabang, we into some familiar looking territory - large limestone karsts that we'd seen in Ha Long Bay and Phong Nha National Park in Vietnam. Sure enough, we docked and were to get out and check out the Pak Ou Caves, a set of two caves that are right on the river (ie only accessible by boat) and that are an important Buddhist monument.
Beth and Robin stayed back, as she was still sleeping. They didn't miss much. The upper cave was a steep walk up a few hundred steps, to a small, dirty, dark cave.
The cave was flanked by a pretty odd, pregnant, simian style Buddha. Really weird.
The lower cave was a little more interesting.
We arrived without incident in Luang Prabang without incident. A fantastic boat trip and a very relaxed way to travel south in Laos. Beth had actually stumbled upon a report right before we left (ahh... Google) about a UK woman who had drowned in an accident taking our slow boat back in April. Day two for her was much more relaxed. As her brother Brian had pointed out, a guy drowned recently taking the Toronto Harbour boat cruise...which either reassured her, or guaranteed that we will never be on the harbour cruise! :-)
We got to our house shortly after. We had decided that Luang Prabang would be a nice place to chill out for a few days, so we've rented a house for six night on AirBnB from a retired Aussie that uses the house as a base to travel around Southeast Asia every year.
No sooner had we arrived then Abby had "searched up" a nearby wood oven restaurant, that turned out to be owned and operated by a guy from Etobicoke - how weird is that? The food was fantastic and I'm sure we will be back.
We got just a taste of Luang Prabang today, but so far it looks sleepy and touristy - which is just fine for us right now. The main tourist strip is nicely laid out and as soon as we got on the street, we ran into Paul and Nadine who are leaving LP tomorrow for a 6 day, 500km bike trip around Laos - very cool.
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