The one thing you have to get used to when travelling in Laos is: Get up latest at 6AM and don’t expect anything going on after 8PM. The people here adapt their lives to the sun – it’s easy as that.

We wanted to follow this rule and Charlotte and I had a hard job waking up Niklas – he had managed to escape the 8PM curfew and had partied till late in the night.

We succeeded and drove through Luang Prabang at 5.45AM. And, yes, the streets were busy.

Luang Prabang is what Cartagena is for Colombia – a beautiful colonial town and a tourist magnet. While Cartagena scores with a beach, Luang Prabang has something different: 1’000 hungry monks.

As in most Buddhist countries I have seen, monks don’t need to cook by themselves. They simply walk from house to house and every serious Buddhist will put some food in their bowl (yes, me too, I have wondered how croissants go together with, let’s say, sticky rice and Mekong-fish-filet). In Luang Prabang, the food-chain is even more sophisticated: For the great pleasure of tourists and adventurous over-landers, the citizens of this colonial town line up before 6AM every morning along the main temple street (there are loads temples in LP). They have some food with them and when the monks walk by, every person donates a handful of rice or a spoon of meat into the monks’ bowls. Tasty. The whole procession takes the better part of an hour and is held in relative quietness.

Clever business-grand-mothers sell their own bowl of rice out to tourists for as much as 5 dollars (that’s super over-prized forLaos), and all-inclusive tourists can take part in the feeding spectacle. We were happy just to take pictures.

Luang Prabang in general was nice but not that special as many fellow travellers have told us. Don’t bother to go there if you already have been in Cartagena.

After 3 peaceful days and some swimming next to a beautiful waterfall, I said good-bye to Charlotte and Niklas and drove towards Phonsavan where the “Plain of Jars” would be. On the way there I picked up Monique and Sven, two Dutch travellers I had met in Phuket and again in Vang Vieng. Small world, isn’t it?

In Phonsavan we found a nice hostel located next to an old airstrip. We were longing for Cheese Burgers, but the whole city was out of cheese, so we had to go with – once again – noodle soups and chicken with sticky rice.
We would have needed more energy, since the next days would be tough... But we did not know at this point. (read on in "Theories of Jars")