LAOS - A country of highs and lows.
We started in Luang Prabang, an apparently beautiful town by
the river that has been bestowed world heritage status. There’s not much too it,
main things to see are: Pouhsi mountain (yes, all the tourists laugh, it is
pronounced “pussy”), the Buddhist temple, former royal palace and night market.
Highlights were being there for a dragon boat racing and
harvest festival and meeting a lovely British couple.
Lowlights included being floored for five days by food
poisoning and doing a “homestay” which culminated in a panicked rabies run the
hell out of the country.
Things had started off so well. We had signed up to do a
“Biking, trekking, kayaking” combo in and out of the jungle, where we also planned
to stay at an Elephant lodge and do a “Mahout Experience” by training and
caring for elephants rehabilitated from the logging industry.
The biking was great, we then trekked for two days in the
jungle to reach the conclusion that the jungle sucks – it’s full of spiders,
snakes and many other things that want to harm you by bite, cut or poison. I
agree with the environmentalists – put a massive rope around all the jungles of
the world and stay the hell out of it.
We stayed in a village in the depths if the forestation that
reminded me a lot of Zambian villages I had seen on my trip in Africa – kids in
rags dodging toothless crones and rabid dogs – one of which nipped Lorna on the
hand and broke the skin – cue frenzied calls to doctors and airlines. Rabies is
not a “you get quite ill but then you’re fine” type of thing. If it develops it
is 100% fatal. So we got the hell back to the airport and I was being whizzed
around the town on the back of a scooter to buy airline tickets after we had
been told to get the next flight to Bangkok for treatment.
We had planned to spend another two weeks in Laos to go the
plain of jars, the tubing in Vang Vieng and the capital Vientiane but the dog
bite put paid to that with zero refund for everything else we had booked. While
we should have been sad in leaving Laos prematurely, in reality we were quite
happy when we got to Bangkok and saw what a great city it was to visit.
Everybody is different and over time you gravitate to the
things you enjoy more. While it’s important to sample as much of the variety of
life as possible and we make every effort to do so, Team Flood has discovered
that we have a better time in cities that have great histories and architecture
to explore than squalid rural areas twinned with Zambia. As the French once
said at the conclusion of their Indochina adventure – au revoire Laos!
www.GarethFlood.com
www.GarethFlood.com
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