Leaving Luang Prabang...

Erik: Nestled high in the Laos mountains, Luang Prabang is a bit of a cultural mecca of Laos. It boasts a huge number of centuries-old wats (temples), it's own unique cuisine, and many indigenous minority hill tribes in the surrounding mountains. We'd read that there's a chance of smoke in the air in March, when the neighboring farm lands are burned to help clear the land for new crops. However, as our bus wound its way up into the hills, we weren't prepared for what we found: miles and miles and miles of burning hillsides. everywhere. We didn't see more than a few trees spared. Sometimes the high flames came right up to the roadside, lapping the bus and filling it with smoke. Oh, the smoke! It was as if we were driving through some alien landscape devastated by fire bombing. you couldn't see farther than a half mile or so because of the smoke, and it grew thicker and thicker as we approached Luang Prabang.

As we exited the bus, my eyes began to sting and tear from the smoke, and there were ashes falling on us from the sky. T and I looked at each other and decided that we needed to get out of there as soon as possible. Unfortunately, leaving wasn't as easy as all that. We'd planned to head into Northern Thailand from there, and that involved a very long bus ride from a different bus station on the far side of town. We resigned ourselves to staying the night and trudged out into the haze to find a guesthouse.

That night as we walked teary-eyed through the tourist hoards at the market (oddly, none of them seemed to notice the smoke that much), we asked around about bus tickets to the Thai border, but we got different answers from everyone as to the times of the bus, where it left from, and how much it cost. Finally we gave up and decided that we needed to go to the bus station ourselves.

The next morning, after a delicious noodle soup, we headed out. The station is a good 3-mile walk outside of town, over a rickety narrow bridge high over a river gorge. It was pretty, despite the constant haze (none of our photos are any good because of the smoke...). At the station, we got the bus times, and the price (which was about 30% less than the hacks in town were going to charge us.) The next bus would be the following morning, so we headed back into town to have a look around. Luckily, we decided to check our email on the way back – we'd received a message from a friend-of-a-friend in Chiang Mai (northern Thailand), telling us not to come, as the air quality there was terrible. I guess they burn the hills throughout all of northern South East Asia in March! Ugh, so what to do? Where should we go? (At least we hadn't already purchased our bus tickets.) After much thought and much guidebook reading, we decided to head back to Bangkok, where hopefully the air was a bit clearer. We looked into flights there, as you get a 30-day Thai visa if you fly in, but only 15 days if you do the land crossing. Flights were very expensive, but then we noticed a really cheap fare from Vientiane to Kuala Lumpur, and thought, why not? We could always get back into Thailand via Malaysia anyway. So without thinking things through too much, we booked the flight leaving from Vientiane in 3 days. We had wanted to leave Luang Prabang immediately, and by this time we'd already been there over two days...

Of course, now we needed to get back to Vientiane, which meant another long, hot, smoky walk across town to the other bus station. (We saw a great deal more of the outskirts of Luang Prabang than we did of it's World Heritage city center...). We got the times and the price for the bus, and decided at this point to stay one more day and actually see some of the sights of the city – we had traveled quite a long way to get there after all.

To be honest, though, even the wats and colonial architecture didn't wow us that much. We did find some decent food in the town, though. More delicious noodle soups, pastries, and even an all-you-eat (well, actually, all-you-can-shove-onto-one-plate) vegetarian food stall where we ate most nights. Only 5000 kip ($.60) for an enormous plate of food. They also sold delicious BBQ chicken and fish, so we ate quite well.

So in the end, it took us 3 days to figure out how to leave smokey Luang Prabang...

Talor: Luang Prabang was a disappointment. I was looking forward to settling in, sightseeing and doing tours of the surrounding hills to visit some of the minority villages, but it was just too smoky. Under different circumstances, I think I would have enjoyed exploring it, but when we were there, everything was gray and dull.

But at least we found a nice place to stay at the Chao Pha Sith Guesthouse, a lovely room with a balcony. And, we ate well. The food at the night market was definitely the best deal in town, and it was delicious, especially the bbq chicken breast and fish. Unfortunately, it wasn't worth the headaches, teary eyes and sinus problems.

Plus after a month in Cambodia and close to a month in Laos, all the cities, towns and villages started blending into eachother. Although the two countries are different, they share similarities in food, culture and climate, and so everything was beginning to feel the same, and we were burning out on wats and noodle soups. It was time to move on to somewhere different... Malaysia!

Our gray photos of Luang Prabang...

Luang Prabang, Laos