Luang Nam Tha to Luang Prabang
Posted by Anita Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:01:00 GMT
Location: Luang Prabang, Laos
At about 7:45 we left our guest house and made for the bus station as we had heard that we needed to get tickets for the bus to Luang Prabang at 8:30am but we figured we could have breakfast between then and when the bus actually left.
When we got there though we saw that there were not that many seats left and unless we wanted to be sitting in the aisles we had better grab them. We ended up waiting on the bus till about 9:30 for it to leave. I guess it was on Lao time.
The road was quite good on the whole. Every now and then there was a pothole you could lose a convoy of Big Rigs in and there were patches that showed signs that they had been sealed at some stage but were no longer. On the whole the roads were genuinely quite alright. If of course you take into account that the fastest moving thing on these roads are probably scooters (or a bus on the downhill).
The use of horns is always something I quite enjoy in south east asia. this bus driver was very courteous, warning people in the villages that he was coming and the people around blind corners that he may not be on the correct side of the road. I think that horns should be reserved for just those purposes and never used in impatience.
Somewhere around the middle of our journey the bus had a flat tyre. We didn’t get the impression that this was a particularly rare occurence. So we all stood around and watched the guys change the tyre, a task which they seemed to be pretty good at.
It Started raining quite hard at one point and we were flagged down by a guy who had been trying to bike from Luang Nam Tha to Luang Prabang He’d done pretty well but it is an incredibly windy hilly 12 hour bus journey and would take days to cycle. That and the rain probably dicoraged him from continuing when he saw the warm dry bus.
When we arrived in Luang Prabang at around 6:30 it was raining again. We stopped at a guest house mentioned in the Lonely Planet and it was full. So we walked down the street in the rain until we found another one that looked in our price range and tried there but it was also full. We carried on stopping at each guest house we passed (and there were quite a few) and they all seemed to be full. Eventually we found one that was a little more than we would normally pay but took it because it was dry. I suppose it was only $15 and it did have a TV and airconditioning.
