Luang Prabang – the first impact with paradise in Laos

I left for Asia in the first part of April, after a long and unbearable wait. I had bought the plane tickets from Qatar Airways in early January. I chose the destinations after many failed attempts to combine 4 countries in 4 weeks. In a natural order of things, I wanted relaxation, fun, visiting the important sights, the beach and a little shopping at the end. Obviously, the shopping part was my secret plan :) It was the first time I was leaving for a month with only hand luggage in which I put the bare necessities and with a small backpack on my back with the indispensable camera. We chose to fly with Qatar Airways again and, after a stopover of almost two hours in Doha, during which I looked for the smoking area 3 times and forgot where it was just as many times, I took the plane to Bangkok. I landed in Thailand around 7 am and, having no checked baggage, I went through the transit area to the departure terminal, with the destination Luang Prabang – Laos. Landing in Luang Prabang was the moment when I started to hate propeller planes and, to my dismay, this was just the beginning, I was to find out that in Asia you fly with such planes. I am not at all a fan of air travel, on the contrary, during the entire trip, I am very nervous and scared of any tremors. This time, however, things were more complicated, the flight of only one hour seemed eternal to me, there was so much turbulence that many times I was sure that I would end up in the mountains of Laos, especially since I suddenly remembered that a few years ago, a Lao Airlines plane crashed into the Mekong River. We were approaching landing and, as I sat in the window seat and carefully analyzed the plane's propeller, occasionally glancing at the mountains that opened up menacingly beneath our feet, our propeller plane entered a gap in the air and suddenly lost altitude. It was at this moment that some ladies started screaming, the sensation I felt was that, without our seat belts, we would have been thrown out of our seats. It was ugly, very ugly and, although I was very scared, I didn't make a sound, it was only after the plane had straightened up that I started to cry and shake. With my legs shaking even more, we arrived in Luang Prabang around noon, we checked into Villa Champa, a nice and neat guesthouse located near the Mekong River, where we were greeted with a plate of fruit that I really missed. We hadn't slept for over 30 hours, but that didn't convince us to stay in the room, so we went out to explore the area and make our first contact with the extremely quiet and calm people of the city. The target I set myself was to find a massage parlor, luckily there were many, but since we were starving, we looked for a place to eat. The first shock was the extremely low price we paid for the food, about 6 USD for two people. We discovered Lao beer and made friends on the spot 🙂 A good and restful sleep followed, we went out to the night market and spent the evening among the stalls with locally cooked food, fresh fruit juices, clothes, souvenirs and lots of jewelry. After a dinner with everything on a plate that cost us 1 USD per person, we went to the banks of the Mekong and enjoyed a Lao beer, so, before going to sleep. But plans were about to change, because I remembered that I had promised myself a massage. My husband was begging me to forget about the massage and go to sleep, because it was very late, and we were tired, but all I could think about was a foot massage. Who else was there besides me at 11:00 PM in Luang Prabang, looking for a place in one of the many massage parlors? It may seem a little hilarious that at that hour there was no one on the street, but also on the first evening spent in Los I was surprised that from around 9:00 PM you can't find many shops and restaurants open, people go to bed and the city slowly sinks into darkness. No sign of fun or music played at its maximum. In fact, the city breathes spirituality through every pore, you see temples and Buddhist monks everywhere.