Last day in Luang Prabang

After the Tak Baat fiasco, we made our way to JoMa bakery, to get some fresh chocolate croissants and Lao coffee. And we were not disappointed! The coffee was strong, the croissants warm and the chocolate divine.

We decided to continue our sightseeing of Luang Prabang. As usual, we gave ourselves an easy morning of relaxing at the hotel: reading and chatting with each other.

Around noon we headed to our first stop for the day: The Royal Palace. There is no official tour (or royalty), but the place is set up such that you guide yourself through the palace and there are markings in places to give you enough information on the rooms and artifacts. One thing that was interesting was a series of 16 or so paintings that depicted the story of an ancient Lao Prince who gave away a royal white elephant which caused him to be banished from the kingdom for several years. After facing many hardships, but living up to his ideals, he eventually he returns to the kingdom to assume his role as the king. The palace was more “simplistic” compared to other palaces I’ve seen in India, but quite nice.

For lunch, we headed to Tamarind Laos. This place is talked about a lot in almost all guidebooks/online forums. The food is different from all other restaurants – it’s more local. We ordered the sampling platter and it was excellent: rice served with various sauces. You create a ball of the rice with your hand, and then dip it in your favorite sauce. I simply chose the spiciest. We also had some river weed, which was slightly bitter, but good! The owners are very well known but were away (having a baby!!). We ended up buying some Lao coffee from this place.

Lunch done, we headed to Wat Xieng Thong, Luang Prabang’s most famous wat! It was beautiful! I spent some time around taking pictures, but the afternoon heat was getting too much for us to continue more wat-seeing. Besides we were ‘watted out’ already. I did not like that thought. Our next destination was Cambodia and it’s temples. There was no way, I could afford to be tired of temples!

Heena wanted to visit a local village that specialized in Lao silk (the same one we visited on our fist day here), so we got a tuk-tuk to take us there. On the ride, we saw parts of Luang Prabang most visitors never venture out to. It reminded me of Jalgaon and stirred up a lot of memories for me. Once thing we could not fail to notice was that, even though Laos was a third world country, even the outskirts were very clean.

After pottering around in many silk shops the village for a bit, we came back and I hiked up Mt. Phousi for the sunset, while Heena got a foot massage. I took some shots but it was a zoo of tourists up there and no fun. So I headed down before the crowd realized it was sundown, met up with Heena and we had dinner at some place I can’t remember on the main street: Noodle soup and pizza – mmm!

After dinner, we walked about the streets (not the main ones) near the wats and had a quick desert of chocolate crepe at Tum Tum Cheng.

Novice Monks

As we exited the restaurant, we saw some novice monks across the street, they looked like kids “hanging out” (just like we used to hang out downstairs in our apartment building when we were kids). We walked across the street and greeted them with a “sabai-dii”. They responded back and we had a conversation with them for about 15-20 minutes. One of them spoke very good English and he told us about where he and his friends were from, what each of them was studying, how often they meet their parents. One of the monks’ parents live only 3 hours away from Luang Prabang but he had not seen them for 2 years due to financial reasons! The monk who spoke to us said he wants to become a tour guide in Luang Prabang when he finishes college (he was 18 years old). I sincerely hope he achieves his dream.

It was a perfect way to end our last day in Luang Prabang. We walked the main stretch one more time, got a fruit shake and back to our hotel. The next day we would catch a flight in the morning to go see the monuments that started this whole trip in the first place: Angkor!