30th – Climbing Pho Si

5 hours of sleep later we met for breakfast at 0830 with rain pouring down. Today was a free day, i.e. nothing planned as part of the tour so we could make our own schedule. After having a quick talk with our guide, we decided to hold off on much until after midday.

Around 1100 I started getting bored and restless so I got dressed and headed out for a walk. Almost the moment I stepped outside the rain stopped so the timing could barely have been better. I walked around Pho Si mountain and ended up going to the top despite the overcast grey weather. But arriving at the top it turned out the visibility was good enough to get a nice overview of most of Luang Prabang, with the surrounding hills and mountains only being partly covered by clouds.

View from the top of Pho Si mountain.

Coming down again I returned to the hotel where I teamed up with 3 others and together we visited the Royal Palace (which had been turned into a national museum). When trying to get in I got turned away as you could not bring any photographic equipment or bags with you inside, so I had to backtrack to the lock boxes (which, to my surprise, were free) before I was allowed inside and tour the museum. The receiving hall was beautiful and all blinged up, the rest was basically ordinary living quarters (albeit in a fairly fancy building). A lot of ceremonial equipment and gifts from other nations were also on display throughout the palace.

Haw Pha Bang at the Royal Palace.

From there we split up; the others wanted to see one of the oldest temples (from 1300-ish) in town while I wanted to see the UXO Luang Prabang Centre. It’s the local division of the Lao National Unexploded Ordnance programme, a programme that locates and dismantles unexploded ordnance from the secret war. The museum itself was located in the buildings of the centre itself and consisted of a few small rooms with information posters describing the – often dangerous – work of the crews and a small film room where a few short documentaries were looping. They were quite upfront with what the bombs do to villages and others that unintentionally bump into these in their daily life. They estimate that during 1964-1973 more than 2 million tons of bombs were dropped, many of these cluster bombs. They estimate a 30% rate of unexploded bombs which means that there is app. 80 million unexploded undetonated bombs located across the entire country. A very informative, but harrowing, experience.

I returned to the hotel and around 1800 I returned to the mountain in an attempt to see the sunset like many others having the same idea. To my disappointment the sunset was not nearly as colourful as I had hoped, but as the clouds to the west had cleared a bit there was an ok view of the setting sun.

Sunset.

From there I once again descended and met up with most of the rest of the group at a restaurant at 2000 and from there afterwards we returned to the hotel around 2½ hours later, ending the day early-ish.