Luang Prabang

I'll be honest about it, I didn't really like Luang Prabang.  Maybe this has something to do with the fact that the bus got in before dawn at 5am, shortly after I'd drifted off, and left us 5 km out of town.  Maybe it started then.  I had to tag along with some other backpackers who had GPS in order to get into town.

Getting to town involved crossing...this bridge.

FFS.

The town itself...I mean, it was a tourist trap.  There were no local people in the center of town.  We're not talking about a backpacker district, the entire town consisted of tours, hotels, guest houses, restaurants, museums, etc.  All the people who probably used to live in Central have moved into rather nice villas on the outskirts--and I know, because we walked through it.

Add to this that no one is there during the day...like it was a total ghost town; my guess is that everyone spends the day doing tourism in the countryside and comes back at night...except I never did find any sign of nightlife (mind you, I passed out at 9pm due to exhaustion from not sleeping on the bus, so it's not as though I particularly looked).

See the streets and street-side shops teeming with life?

...yeah, me neither.

There was an enormous pinnacle hill lumped into the middle of town that you always have to walk around (as in, several kilometers out of your way in the pounding heat) or climb over (making use of about 500 meandering steps) to get to the other side.

I mean climbing about 25 different versions of this just to get to the other side of the park

There was also a grungy red haze in the air due to it being slash-and-burn season.

See what I mean?

Anyway, I found it somehow depressing.

I couldn't stay for more than 1 night, though I did manage to do all the requisite temples.  There's a surprising amount packed into that little strip.  Take a look:

Temples galore.

And Buddhas galore.

And I mean galore.

Yep, galore.

I wasn't lying.

See the nice detail work on the door?

Buddhas on the hill.

Oh look.  Another Buddha.

I don't even feel like captioning anymore.

These are birds in little baskets.

Undoubtedly, the best part (though also the most annoying if you're trying to walk across town) is the enormous hill I told you about.  They've built a lot of temples on it, and I walked to the top to watch the sunset. 

.

There are a lot of other things you could do, though, if you weren't a broke itinerant ex-English teacher eking a grand vacation out on a shoestring.  I would badly have liked to learn about the regional hill people, see waterfalls, ride elephants, go to butterfly gardens--you could do this too, if you went and weren't poor.

I satisfied myself with this necklace...

The brown beads are made of job's tears seeds, crafted by an indigenous person.