Smartpunters.com - Blog the Earth

Today was a great trip, but ended up being something of a disaster.  I wandered around town and looked at all the temples.

There are a lot of buddhist temples in Luang Prabang.  It has been a religious center for a long time and the king used to live here. 

(A multi-headed snake at the entrance of the temple on palace grounds)

The older temples are mostly crumbling, but the newer ones were quite beautiful.  Some of the temples seem to double as schools for boys.

There are boys all over the place in the saffron robes that showed they are monks in training. 

Around mid-afternoon, I suddenly realized that I was frying.  I was covered in sweat and absolutely exhausted.  I hadn't really been paying attention to the heat and then, it was all I could pay attention to.   I went down to the river in the hopes there would be a cool breeze.  On the bank, there was a group of Americans getting into a boat to go see some caves upstream.  That sounded great.  I asked them if I could come along and they were quite happy to share the cost, so off we went. 

Our Boat

 We stopped at one point to get more gas on the river-bank.  The 'gas-station' seemed to be run entirely by kids.  This little guy helped keep the boat steady:

We reached the Pak Ou cave after about 2 hours.  It was sort of like a repository for statues of the Buddha.  There were hundreds and hundreds of them.  This foto isn't very good because I was using a shitty disposable camera, but you can see how beautiful the view was from the cave:

Anyway, I said the day ended up a disaster, because I didn't plan very well.  Luang Prabang must be one of the few tourist destinations in the world that has no ATMs.  The only way to get cash is to go to the bank and have them write a money order backed by your credit card.  So, I ran out of money because I got to the bank too late (it's the government bank and it seems to open about 3 hours a day).  Then, I ran out of water and of course I didn't have any food.  As mentioned, it was very hot.  By the time we got back to Luang Prabang, I felt like I had been wrung out.  The only thing I could do was walk back to my hotel and put dinner and water on my tab.  I was shaky and totally exhausted and it took until the next day to feel normal again.