Loas in a nutshell

Hello everybody! I feel like i have so much to catch up on from the last few days! Ah- so this will be really summarized. So alana and I decided to get into Loas via what they call a "slow-boat" which takes 2 days as opposed to a "fast-boat" which takes only 6 hours. We wanted to take the fast boat but when we learned that you have to wear full-on crash helmets, that fatalities are common, and that they may be banned soon, we opted with the slowboat. We didn't arrange our Loas Visas ahead of time so we went with a group, that way we get our visas in 10 mins instead of 3 days.

So the day we leave we wake up early cuase the van is picking us up early (6.30am) and all goes smoothly. We pick up everyone else then we make a stop that we thought was our visas, so alana and i had commented to each other repetitively "Wow that was such a simple process, i sure hope all the other countries are the same!" Little did we know that was the pre-visa paper work...the really visa adventure was yet to come! This is what happened point form (just remember to add panic into the mix becuase at the begining we were told we only had 10 mins until the boat left, we were also exhausted becuase we slept terribly that night becuase we didn't have an alarm so we kept waking up and we didn't have any time for breakfast, and we were lugging ALL our luggage, oh and it was raining and i don't have any rain gear):

-pick up the other people

- drive for 2 hrs

- stop to fill our pre-visa forms

-get a bagged lunch, back into van

-drove down to water

-stamped out of Thailand, exchanged money to US dollar to pay for Visa

-crammed into "long-tail" boats

-crossed river in "no-mans-land" aka buffer land

-jumped our of boat (alana lost her sandal, but we got it back)

-dumped our luggage outside in the rain

-gave our passports over to some officer

-waited in the massive crowd for our name to be called so we can push through everyone to pay for our visa

- wait in another line to check into loas

- run back down and gather luggage and run up hill

-stop and show visa agian to some guy

-walk along street to sign sheet for boats, exhange Baht (Thai money) to Kip (Loa money), and buy pillows becuase boats are uncomfortable

- pile a bunch of us and our bags into a truck tuk-tuk, give them our passports

- get our near water, get passport, then climb down a long, steep, muddy bank, balance on a skinny, wabbly plank into boat. Alana dropped her lunch into the water but luckly some other guy dove in a got it lol

-yay we're on the boat, and finally seated after about half hour or shuffling!



The first day of the boat ride wasn't nice beucase we were soooo grimy from sweating then being stuck in this dusty boat plus it was raining out so we'de get wet every now and agian. The boat was not what we were expecting. when we booked our tickets we were told there would prolly be 20 people on it becuase its a slow time of year. NO WAY was it like that! I would guess they squished on 100 people. There were no extra seats, people already covered the floor, so they brought out extra chairs to fill the isle. Anyways, we made it. We spent the night in Pak Beng, a little hill side village which was gorgeous! We had an awsome room that was really clean (except for all the bugs ie. the one that flew up alanas shorts lol). I never thought i'de see a view like that in my life! The next day on the boat we were much better prepared...we carried on only what was neccessary! The ride was amazing! The sun was shining and the boat was nicer than the first one. Alana and i each had a whole bench to ourselves so we had some room. The river winds between huge mountians covered in jungle foliage. Occasionally you see a few bamboo huts or a gold temple higher in the mountians that shines in the sun. No description or picture could ever captivate the beauty along the Mekong River!

This takes up so where we are long new...Luang Praabang. and once agian i love it here! It is so relaxed and lay back. i think it would be impossible for anyone here to have even a small amount of stress. Today we took a tuktuk truck up to a waterfall. We didn't know what to expect so it was a shocker to see that we stepped into paradise! i honestly didn't think places that this existed naturally!!!!!! The waterfall was huge and landed around caves. The waterfall poured down into many pools that we could swim in. The water was torquise blue (more torquise then were we were in mexico!) and was refreshingly cool. Bamboo and palm trees lined the edges and there were little areas that looked like bubbling hot tubs (though they weren't cause they were cool like the rest of the water). Hiking part way up the falls, there was an old huge abandonded (what looks like a) resturant. It was 3 levels and had a woven roof out of leaves and a beautiful wooden pattern along all the walls...agian, i didn't things like this acually existed! We stayed there untill we had to meet our driver agian. When i have more time (my tummy is pretty hungry now!) i will try and post some of our pictures of it so you can get a glimpse of this paradise. it might be my favourite place on earth!

Tomarrow we are flying Siem Reip in Cambodia. We were planning on hitting one more place in Loas ,then go over to Hanoi in Vietnam but flight times, prices, and Visas are making that more difficult so we had to change our plans. We feel like we actually saw quite alot of Loas beucase of the long boat ride through it. It seemed that everything was working agianst us for Vietnam (prehaps for the best) so we decided to skip down to Cambodia. We're leaving tomarrow morning at 9 am. There is ALOT to see in Cambodia so we're VERY excited! Hopefully we'll be able to blog some more in Cambodia. Here is a bit perimitive ex. theres only 3 ATMS in all of Cambodia! Needless to say that its hard to get internet here (as we learned today from our travel agent- we were just about to book our flight tickets and the internet went down for several hours lol). Well i hope to keep you all posted and remember to post things on my blog to keep my updated! Luv u all