There’s not much to say for today. We pretty much traveled from 7:30 am til 8pm, bussing from Vientiane to Luang Prabang.
Some advice for future reference – I wouldn’t recommend the overnight bus because the path is hella twisty mountain driving so its pretty dangerous at night, plus there are cows and chickens in the road that our bus driver had to honk away. Also trying to sleep on a bus just sucks. Trains and planes are already hard enough to fall asleep as is.
Also, most hostels can arrange the trip, but if you want to make it on your own, just grab a tuk-tuk and head to Vientiane’s North Bus Terminal.
I would say that if you’re down for the long trip, it’s a pretty bombass view. The farmlands are really pretty, and you just see gently rolling lumps (they’re not really actual hills) of paddies. As you get into the mountains, there are a lot of corn fields that come up, at various stages of sprouting. There are bigger villages, with communal pumps and splashing children, or small collections of houses, built with bamboo and some brick, balancing off the side of cliffs.
The bus driver would stop once in awhile, when a market came by. Sometimes people just sold general snacks, but after awhile, the markets became specialized. There was one stop where people just sold a large assortment of dried fish, one with lots of roasted or steamed corn, and there was even a point where the bus driver himself got off and picked up bags of vegetables from an organic produce market in the mountains. It was actually rather cute and it was pretty cool to see the support there was for the different villages along the way.
A good difference between this ride and the ride between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh was that there were actually nice bathrooms. Yea, they were squat toilets, but they were pretty clean, and it definitely beat watching people pee into a bush on the side of the road.
When we pulled into Naluang Bus Station, there were already shared taxis waiting for us. Naturally all the foreigners were shoved into one car and sent off towards the night market (there’s really only one direction to go anyways, since the town is so small). Along the way we hopped off to check into our hostel and drop things off. We then headed out again to check out the night market, which is located along the tip of the peninsula (between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers).
There were plenty of smoothie stands but not much else in terms of food that we saw. We tried a fried coconut dessert, which ended up being too sweet for me and I wasn’t a fan of how the coconut melts into a gooey paste. All of the restaurants along the night market road (located at the beginning and end of the road) are geared towards tourists and not the best tasting or the cheapest. It was also where a lot of hostels were located, and seemed to be travelers central, considering the number of tour agencies nearby.
The stalls at the night market were pretty interesting. There’s a good amount of textiles, bags, and paintings around, and you can easily haggle prices down 50%. The market closes pretty early though, and we didn’t have too much time to walk around before people started packing up. We decided we would come back to comb through the place more thoroughly the next day, and walked back to our hostel to crash.