Monk in training in a large monastery in Luang Prabang, Laos

[The_Traveler]

Monk in training in a large monastery in Luang Prabang, Laos

I was just going over pictures from my Laos trip, re-editing many of them (I was so bad then) and I realized that there were many quite nice ones I have never posted.

I had written a 4 part blog post on Laos here

This is the first two paragraphs

Adventures on the Road in Northern Laos

There are two kinds of tourists in Laos. The first is those tourists with more money and little time; these fly into the only well-known tourist destinations, see the sights and then fly back out. The other kind is those with a lot more time who travel from place to place by bus and see the many smaller places that are not so much sights as experiences. That's me. I had planned on 5 weeks in Southeast Asia, most of that in northern Laos.

Travel by road in Laos is very slow; there are only about 2000 miles of paved road in the entire country and much of that is poorly maintained. Additionally, the public buses are generally worn out specimens imported from Thailand, Korea or Japan, prone to break-down at best and to total failure at worst. Every long distance bus carries a mechanic and I was never on a long bus ride that didn't have some sort of mechanical problem of some kind. On the last leg of my final bus ride into Vientiane from the North, the mechanic sat above an open hatch in the floor in the back of the bus and had to finalize every up-shift of the driver with a resounding whack with a large sledge on the transfer case below.