Luang Prabang

We've been in one spot for eight days, so have a chunky update. If you just want the SparkNotes and pretty pictures, here's a summary in 10 words: Lao New Year, beer-fuelled water fights, elephants, thunderstorms, quitting Instagram.

Luang Prabang is the former capital and royal seat of Laos, and the most important cultural hub in the country. Its downtown area is almost entirely a UNESCO world heritage site. You can immediately feel the difference here compared to Thailand — almost all the buildings are single or double storey, with wooden cladding and roof tiles, traditional architecture and a terracotta and cream colour scheme. It's very nice! Dan embraced the beauty of the place by immediately blocking the toilet with a large deposit as soon as we arrived. He was too embarrassed to ask the staff for help within five minutes of checking in, so filled up the plastic bin with water from the sink and managed to flush it manually after several tries. Little did we know, it was the first of many buckets of water we'd be throwing this week...

On our second day in Luang Prabang, we went to a shop on the high street to book an Elephant Village tour. The high street was quite chaotic; Laos holds its New Year celebrations (Pi Mai) on April 14-16, and the best place to be is Luang Prabang. Pi Mai is the equivalent of Songkran in Thailand: the world's biggest water fight. The city centre was gearing up for it days beforehand, with military-grade water blasters on sale in all the street stalls. So all the high street shops set up tables where punters can drink beer, refill their water guns from huge barrels, and get completely soaked. In the spirit of Pi Mai hospitality, the staff at Elephant Village invited us for a drink and snacks with them after we'd booked. We went into the back room with them for a quick, polite drink, and stumbled out four hours later (still in full daylight). It turns out Lao people love giving free beer to guests at New Year. This was on the 12th; the party hadn't even started properly yet.

The closer it got to Pi Mai, the more hectic the city became. Hordes of people race around the city on scooters and mopeds (up to five people per bike), wielding their water guns, faces covered in red and white flour, like a budget Mad Max reenactment. They will squirt anyone indiscriminately, so you have to keep your valuables in plastic bags. There are also flatbed trucks driving around with full paddling pools in the back, full of more kids with guns and buckets. In return, shop owners and their families will fire hosepipes back at pedestrians or vehicles. This seems dangerous for the overloaded scooters, but everyone appears to be having fun so we tried not to think too hard about it. The shops also have industrial speakers hooked up to blast out Lao club music at deafening volume (every shop plays something different, in close proximity). Everyone is getting drunk throughout; it's bonkers.

Luckily for us, our friends at the Elephant Village tourist shop invited us back to join them for another session during the festival proper. It meant we had a base to keep our bags dry in relative safety, and also a near-unlimited supply of free beer. We invested in some big water guns of our own and took a stand on the street to terrorise all passersby. It's surprising how quickly a big gun makes you give up any pretense of following the Geneva convention. We even had a small army of child soldiers armed with buckets, for whom we provided cover while they darted out and fully drenched our worst enemies. These included people with neatly groomed hair, those with any dry clothes remaining, those unwisely trying to film the festivities on their phones, and groups of Americans wearing matching Hawaiian shirts.

Aside from Pi Mai, we also crammed in a bunch of other activities during our eight-day stay. The Elephant Village tour — an ethical sanctuary where we could feed and wash rescued elephants — was really special. Even if we were extremely hungover and one elephant did shit in the river upstream of Dan so it coated his legs as it flowed past.

We went to a night market to watch 'Miss Pi Mai', where girls from across Laos compete in a sort of beauty pageant to decide who gets the honour of riding the tiger (not a euphemism) at the big parade. The rabid screaming of the supporters and their vuvuzelas was a bit incongruous, considering this was a painfully slow procession of identically-dressed women for three hours. We skipped out after 45 minutes to get Lao BBQ skewers for dinner which, FYI, are maybe the best food discovery of the year so far (and only 30p each).

On the final night of Pi Mai we went to a slightly more upmarket hotel restaurant for their daily screening of 'Chang', a 1920s silent film about jungle life which was filmed in the area. We thought this would be relaxing after a few hectic days. In fact, the screen was right next to 500m of gridlocked Lao and Chinese teenagers, revving their engines and blasting their horns. To make matters more intense, during the first half of the film there was a flash thunderstorm, with apocalyptic winds and sideways rain that tore down palm fronds and sent bins rolling down the rapidly emptying street. The staff had a frantic rush to bring in anything not bolted down, which made it feel a bit like being in the dining room on the Titanic. The film itself was also slightly traumatic.

It’s not been all chaos and hedonism, we’ve also visited the Kuang Si waterfalls and several museums. The gold-leafed royal palace is a time capsule from the end of an empire and the UXO exhibits are extremely confronting. Laos is the most bombed country in the world per capita. Dozens of people are victims of unexploded ordinance every year, even 50 years since the American shelling ceased. One particularly brilliant museum is the Tradition Arts and Ethnography Centre, spearheading the Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative to stop fast fashion brands from appropriating the heritage of the local Hmong tribes.

One last note in an already long update: we've decided to give ourselves a break from Instagram. We really enjoy writing this blog and Chelsea's monthly email newsletter. But Instagram has felt like a chore. It sucks our time and energy, we increasingly hate the content, and we're not sure who we're doing it for. Just making the decision to ditch it feels liberating already. It's a shame it took us 100 days to make the call.

We're now on a bullet train to our next stop. Updates should be back to normal frequency from now on!Läs mer