Luang Prabang : Day 2 (Part 1)

18 November 2016

Breakfast was rice soup, scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage with Lao coffee – delicious!

Then off to the airport for our flight to Luang Prabang. The entire town of Luang Prabang is a World Heritage Site, situated in a valley. It has a population of about 78,000 people. It was the shortest flight in my life, 30 minutes including take off and landing.

Our guide Lon met us at the airport and took us to the hotel to check in. I liked the ambience of the hotel, but we later discovered that it was not in a very strategic location i.e. not walking distance to the city.

From the hotel we went to the harbour where we alighted a very pretty (and much too big) boat for a cruise along the Mekong river. The harbour is situated where the Nam Khong river meets the Mekong river. The views from the river were very beautiful. During the dry season (which was now), the depth of the Mekong is about 10 metres deep. During the rainy season, it can go up to 50 metres deep!

After about 2 hours, we arrived at the Pak Ou Caves, formed from limestone cliffs. “Pak” means mouth and “Ou” is from the name of the river Nam Ou. So, mouth of the river Nam Ou. The Cave is divided into the lower (Tham Ting) and upper (Than Theung) cave. In the lower cave, we saw thousands of Buddha icons (according to our guide, more than 7,000) made of wood, metal and clay, which were brought and left in the cave from the 17^th century till to date. Originally, the cave was in reverence to the spirit of the river and later, to Buddha. People from all over Laos come to the cave to leave a Buddha icon in the cave.

The upper cave is a much bigger cavity with more Buddha statues. According to our guide, in the 8^th century, Lao people came from South China, and stayed in the upper cave for some time before eventually venturing out and constructing villages, farms etc

The caves are a very popular pilgrim site for locals especially during the Lao New Year in April (suspiciously the Tamil New Year is also in April) when the locals will wash and attend to the images. There are markings on the outer wall of the lower cave marking the height of the Mekong river when it floods; the worst was in 1966 and thereafter in 2008 and 2009.