After our two day trek we returned for one more night in Nong Khiaw. Chatting with Dan over dinner that night it suddenly hit me: I was ready for a city. The thing about traveling in Southeast Asia is that so many of the popular tourist towns (such as Hoi An, Chiang Mai and Luang Prabang) feel like they’re designed for visitors. In our experience it’s in the bigger cities that you feel like you can actually blend in a…
Laos is a sparsely populated, rural, landlocked nation whose geography is mostly defined by rivers and huge mountain ranges. Unlike other countries in Southeast Asia, there are no beaches or ultra-modern mega-cities to attract visitors. Instead, the draw here is the unique and awe-inspiring natural beauty. Therefore we knew that hiking would be the best way to truly see and get to know Laos. Trek #1 We did two treks in Laos. The first was a day trip from Luang…
Luang Prabang is a beautiful little town located on a peninsula at the intersection of the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers in northern Laos. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and thus retains much of its colonial architecture. I could feel the French influence more strongly in Luang Prabang than anywhere else in Southeast Asia thus far. Walking some of the streets I could almost fool myself that we were in a European village. But then a little Buddhist…
Since leaving Ankor Wat we have been to Kampot and Sihanoukville in Cambodia and then to Chiang Mai, Chiang Dao, Pai and Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. I plan to write about and post pictures of all of these places but for now I’m going to skip ahead for a moment and talk about the last two days which we spent cruising down the Mekong River from Huay Xai at the Laos border to Luang Prabang, where we arrived last…