One foot in the Mekong

On Sunday we had a bit of a disappointing trip out to the Pak Ou Caves. The caves are about 25km up the Mekong river from Luang Prabang and the journey there took about 2 hours in a long tail boat. On the way to the caves we stopped at a village where they make lao lao, which is a whisky type spirit distilled from sticky rice. There wasn't a lot to see, in fact the most entertaining thing was a statue of what appeared to be a monkey eating a banana whilst wearing a cowboy hat!
Anyway back to those caves. . . There are two caves which are promoted as the Buddha caves and were stuffed with all different sizes and types of statues. Most of which where caked in dust, dirt and cobwebs.

I thought the trip up the Mekong would have been more interesting than going by road. But in reality spending two hours in a boat to go and look at a load of dusty Buddhas in the dark was a bit cack.

Then we had to make the journey back, which thankfully was a little quicker as it was downstream. However; there was a slight incident when we tried to get back on the boat which helped finish the day off. As Liz was climbing down the ladder onto the jetty she slipped through one of the rungs and fell face first onto the walkway. Ending up sprawled with one leg stuck in the ladder whilst the other dangled in the Mekong in a pose that would win the Luang Prabang twister competition 2008. Looks like she'll have some nice bruises just in time for when we hit the beaches in Thailand.

The evening helped ease the pain as we found a great bar/restaurant at the back of the town called Lao Lao Garden. It's a really beautiful terraced outdoor venue lit with fairy lights and open fires. Liz can't have been too injured though as she managed to eat all of her water buffalo burger washed down with a couple of Beer Lao and a pina colada!