Luang Prabang - Vang Vieng

As you may already understood from our silence, we've been neglecting the blog for some time. actually we write things down in a diary. We just dont have any time, back in the civilized area there are too much things to do in the evenings..
Anyway, we are perfectly fine. For the last week we had purely "white man tourism" experience - private drivers, organized kayaks, western food restaurants, colonial style fancy rooms, many fruit shakes and a lot of beer.
We gone from Luang prabang to Viang Vieng, and tomorrow morning we continue to the capital city of Laos - Viantiene. It supposed to be quite boring, so on the same night we contimue to Bangkok.
I'll try to upload some photos.

Luang Prabang looks and feels like a colonial town, with plenty of french architecture, good western restaurants with view on the Mekhong river. We stayed there for some 5 nights - way more then we planed. We've seen some extremely beautiful waterfalls, watched the sunset from a wat (temple) on a mountain, gone to boring caves with many budhas. One day we actually splited - me and misha gone to a hike, while Olga decided she has enaugh leeches experience and stayed hanging in town. One day we've been to a local boat racing, wich is actually a rural festival.

But the most beautiful of all, and the main reason we stayed for so long is for the budhist new year celebration. All the temples were preparing paper decorations, in the nights they where filled with paper lights. Each temple made a boat from bamboo and paper. Each village made a boat too. The top of the celebration was in the night when the procession of village boats with dancing and fireworks reached the Mekhong, where the boats were put in the water. Everyone - locals and tourists - lighted a candle on a small banana leaf boats and sent it by the Mekhong. Imagine the river filled with thousands of candles and big lighting dragon shaped boats.. We where really lucky to get to see this.

Vang vieng is a village of tourists. Tourist Heaven. Capital of shanti. You just go up the river by tuk tuk ("taxi"), and go down by tube or kayak, stopping on the way to see a cave, to jump to the river from some omega or simply to drink some beer.


Well, I better start going, so
Miss you all,
[as much as possible in our situation ;) ]
See you soon!