As mentioned in my previous post, after recovering 700 photos from my iPhone backup, I was able to remember what I actually did in Laos with my friend Richard (from Singapore). Some of the photos exhibit such glorious nature that I wanted to write another Laos post to share the beauty with you. The sad part of the story is that Laos has dangerous roads. Maybe taking public buses would have been safer than having a private driver? I’ll never know. Please enjoy my journey by clicking on the photos and reading the captions:

Arrival in Luang Prabang

Almost immediately upon our descent, we were greeted with the treat of Laotian mountains. After meeting up with Richard at the hotel, I headed to the riverfront down the main road. I then returned to the hotel and picked up Richard and we went to the main market for dinner.

Mekong River Tour

Tat Sae Waterfalls

Richard planned a day at the waterfalls. The photos cannot do this place justice at all. The sun was so bright and the colors were so blue and green that without a proper camera, there’s no way I could have captured the essence. I’ve attached a few photos here that I thought would give you a sense of it all. The bridge with all of the tourists standing on it was shaking and bending in the middle. That scared the hell out of me.

Indigenous Village Hike

South of the city of Luang Prabang, we had a wonderful guide take us through countryside. After this hike, my sandals were destroyed by the mud. These photos below are some of my favorite from the entire year-long trip. Enjoy :-)

The City of Luang Prabang and THE STORM

Vang Vieng

Our plan in Vang Vieng was to see the countryside and visit one of the famous Blue Lagoons. There are actually five of them, all named Blue Lagoon 1 through 5. We were told that Blue Lagoon 3 is the nicest. Unfortunately, it was mostly concrete. The mountain views on the ride over made it worth it. On our last day in Vang Vieng, we did an early morning river tubing. The river tubing experience is infamous for being related to numerous deaths of drunken Australian backpackers. Along the river, you are encouraged to stop off at the floating bars and get drunk. It seems that some Australian tourists have gotten too drunk and have gotten lost downstream and were left presumably drowned. We actually had a really hard time getting the tubes to the final floating bar station for our departure. Richard’s tube kept going downstream and the guide had to take a motorboat to fetch him. He kept missing him and it took multiple attempts. Eventually the guide came back to fetch me and I was grabbing onto the side the boat, near the dangerous rudder. Eventually I let go of the boat and made my way to the side of the river and climbed my way through the mud and walked to the floating pier. When we both arrived at the pier and told the bartender that we didn’t want to drink, it was around 11am, they told us that the departure point was actually on the other side of the river. We had to get back into the motorboat. This was incredibly frustrating. Little did we know that our departure from the hotel would result in the very sad car accident a few hours later.

Vientiane

After the car accident, we were picked up by another local van driver who was driving along the same road. He took us to the hotel in Vientiane, the capital city. We had our last dinner together that night. In the morning, we did the typical tourist stuff and Richard took these lovely pictures of me with his camera. My camera was lost in the crash. All of these photos below are with Richard’s camera (the rest of the photos on this page were made with my camera before I lost it).