Devin's Travels: Luang Prabang

For anyone who is very much into culture and history then Luang Prabang is a must to go to. The center of the city has been proclaimed a world heritage site since there are so many wats there, there seem to be thousands of them.

I spent a day in Luang Prabang just wandering around the city itself and stopping to visit some of the wats. It was a pretty good day but for myself once I've seen 3 or 4 wats then they all start to look the same. So needless to say I didn't see all of the wats that the town had to offer.

Surrounding the city are some nice waterfalls and caves that can be visited in a day trip, although I split it into 2 half day trips since I didn't get up in time to catch the boat to the caves on the first morning. The waterfall that I went to and the water level wasn't too high so we could climb up to the top of it and stand right on the edge of the waterfall looking down with the water rushing around our feet. At the bottom were sets of smaller falls with pools that were deep enough to swim in so most of the time at the falls was spent swimming in the pools and jumping off of the smaller sets of falls. A great way to spend the afternoon on a hot day. As we were leaving the falls we took a little detour and found a cage of 7 black bears, apparently it was an operation that saved orphaned bears and kept them so they didn't die. The caves that I visited the next day were fairly unimpressive after all of the caves around Vang Vieng. The only slightly interesting part of the caves was that there were thousands of Buddha statues in them.

On my last morning in Luang Prabang I got up at sunrise (5:30am) to see the parade of monks collecting their alms. The entire procession was fairly interesting to watch as hundreds of monks walked down the street collecting rice from locals that lined the street. The only drawback was that there were so many tourists there taking pictures that it didn't seem very real anymore and almost more of a tourist attraction as even some of the tourists joined in giving out alms and getting pictures of them doing it.