Moore Pathammavong's Guide to Winning a Free Car

Vientiane, the small capital city of Laos, was our first introduction to Laos culture. During our two days there we explored the city, falling in love with cheap fresh fruit shakes ($0.60) and the friendly people. The country used to be ruled by the French, which still shows in its many baguette sandwich stands, its French signs, and its Arc de Triomphe replica. Noodle soup is the standard dish here but there is still a variety of curries, fried rice and noodle dishes, and Craig's current favourite, "laap", which is basically a meat salad: minced chicken, pork or beef with mint leaves, lime juice, chillies, shallots, and fish sauce. His new favourite condiment is "jaew bawng", a thick paste of chillies and buffalo skin. Yum!

After Vientiane, our next stop was Vang Vieng, a small town a few hours north. It's surrounded by giant limestone cliffs and filled with backpackers. People come here for one reason only - tubing down the Nam Song River - and the whole town makes its livelihood from the tourist dollars. So, of course we had to try it out.

We rented tubes from the local cooperative and caught a shared tuk-tuk to the launch point 3 km north of town with two fellow Canadians, two Belgians, and a few Brits, who were to become our tubing buddies for the day.

Basically, as you tube down the river the many wooden shacks, aka bars, lining the river throw you a pop bottle on a rope to pull you in to their drinking hole. Cheap buckets or beers follow, before you head back on the river to continue the journey. Bars also have mud tug of war, and a variety of swings, zip-lines, and slides plunging you into the water (and our moms definitely would NOT have liked to see how high some of the jumps were!). We made it down the river safe and sound with just a rope burn and a bruised tailbone at the end.

The 6-hour, 240 km, bus ride to the town where we are now, Luang Prabang, made us glad we bought lots of gravol. The roads here are as hilly and windy as the roads in New Zealand... if the roads in New Zealand were on acid. On the "local" (aka "cheaper") buses, if you arrive too late and all the seats are full you get a plastic stool to sit in the aisle while you dodge the puke bags that get handed out, used, tied up, and let loose to roll around the bus. Funny!

Luang Prabang, along with Vientiane and Vang Vieng, form the Tourist Trifecta - the usual northern route for backpackers in Laos. This town is nice, but VERY touristy. It's right on the Mekong River and is very French, with crumbling mansions and shaded streets (and baguettes and crepes for sale on every corner). Today we visited the Kuang Si waterfalls 32 km south of town. A wide, multi-tiered waterfalls tumbles over limestone rocks and forms many turquoise-green swimming holes. Of course, we had to hike 15 minutes straight up along the waterfall and through some shallow rapids, where we found a beautiful secluded swimming hole - secluded for about 20 minutes, when a giant tour group of Canadian tourists found it. Damn Canadians!

Tomorrow we face a 10-hour, 370 km bus ride further north to Luang Nam Tha, where we can finally consider ourselves off the beaten track. There we plan on looking into trekking in the nearby Nam Ha National Protected Area. Hopefully the gravol keeps on working!

And with the 7800 or so kip to the Canadian dollar, it is REALLY fun taking out 1,000,000 (kip) at the ATM every few days! It's especially nice when the ATM slip gives us our current bank balance in kip, and we are multi-multi-multi millionaires!