Day 93

Luang Prabang > Vang Vieng

After another great breakfast we packed our stuff and headed out to find a tuktuk driver to take us to the train station. I was unreasonably excited to be getting a train as I hadn't been on a train my whole time in Asia and it makes a nice change from the onslaught of busses I had been on. Plus, this was the fancy Laos-China railways funded by the Chinese so I knew it would be nice. We arrived about an hour early which was a bit more than we needed to but we had been warned that the security checks take a while. After showing them our tickets and our passports, we had to put all our baggage through a security scanner. We had been warned that we'd lose our aerosol suncreams which really sucked as it was $10 a can but luckily we managed to get through keeping our suncream and I even managed to keep my knife?

We waited around in the lobby before the call was made for our train, everyone got up and got in a big queue to show their tickets, and by the amount of people it looked like the train would be pretty full then we realised there was about 1000 carriages so we didn't have to worry. The train ride wasn't too long, only about an hour with a random 5 minute stop on the tracks for some reason. We arrived in Vang Vieng and hopped on a shuttle bus to the town centre and checked into our room.

We went on a little walk about to town and found some lunch at a nice little café before seeing some posters for a yoga class at 5pm. We went over to the yoga place and asked it if was suitable for beginners - well I say we but Michelle spent the whole time cuddling a fluffy dog - and they said kind of but the one in the morning would be better. Taking their advice, we headed back and went for a dip in the pool to cool off. Honestly the pool was a bit bleh and I think I cut my foot on a broken tile on the floor but oh well.

We went on another walkaround at sunset, this time seeing a bunch of hot air balloons and paramotors flying through the air. This, against the mountainous backdrop was really quite cool to see flying through the air. We found a pineapple at a fruit market then found a small bar where we could grab a drink. I showed Michelle what the famous Blue Lagoon cocktail was, then we asked the bartender for a chopping board so we could cut up our newly acquired Pineapple which surprisingly went alot better than I expected - probably because she also gave us a much larger and sharper knife than mine. Ofcourse, I also brought my honey making for a tasty snack with the pineapple chunks.

After our drink and pineapple, it started to rain so we ran across the road to a Thai restaurant called Happy Mango which happened to be packed. We got a table and I had a really nice green curry with coconut rice, followed by one of the best mango sticky rice's that I've had on my travels. After that, we headed back to our room and went to bed.Read more