Lovely Laos (Luang Prabang, Laos)

So Laos is great people. Great. I haven't even had to ride a motorbike yet. My English friend Rich and I ran into each other leaving Phenom Penh so we did the trip together and stopped in Kratie, Cambodia for a night to see freshwater dolphins in the Mekong river at sunset. Not bad. The next morning we continued by boat, one of those pretty long skinny Asian boats with a fabulous ear-splittingly loud motor on the back that makes your teeth rattle in your jaw. Immigration was a hut on an island in the middle of the Mekong. A tour company in Kratie had advertised an "apocalypse Now" river trip which seemed funny then, but by the time we arrived at immigration I pretty much expected Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen to greet and then kill me. They didn't.
My first taste of Laos was the island of Don Khon, an itty bitty island where villagers hop about by boat or bicycle and the few tourists around lie in hammocks on the patios of their bungalows because there's nothing else to do. Not that they're complaining. It was a very peaceful place to recover from the more hectic Cambodia and the insane headache I developed somewhere along the way.
From there we took a bus, well more like a very crowded back of a truck with benches, loaded up with people, chickens, and under my feet a basket of croaking frogs - croaking as in ribbeting and croaking as in dying, both, to Tadlo. Tadlo is essentially a collection of guesthouses at the base of a waterfall. The air is fresher and the water clearer than further south and it was amazing. More hours in perfect hammocks were joined by some hours hiking through the jungle and several villages where old women wove and dried chilies while young women ground rice with massive mortar and pestles and babies ran about naked in the dirt. The men keep a lower profile, sometimes building new thatched huts and often just squatting in circles and smoking cigarettes rolled in banana leaves. Setting aside my own mixed moral views, I also rode an elephant.
From Tadlo a night bus to Vientiane, a visit to a park of a million odd Buddha statues, some clean laundry, finally an opportunity to ditch Rich who by this point I wanted to kill mostly just for being boring and English, and a bus to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is the weirdest place ever. It's a dusty little town on the bank of a river at the base of amazing mountains where every restaurant has reclining cushions and low wooden tables so you can be comfortable while you watch "Friends" all day. Seriously, you walk down the main road and you hear the theme song from all directions. It's totally bizarre. I spent 2 days on an incredible organic farm just outside town where I hung out with the Lao farmer (ex-Minister of Agriculture and all around pillar of the community) and his family, a group of 20 high school kids from Singapore, a couple of Korean volunteers, and 2 much less boring English guys, one of whom has been at the farm for a year. It's a really amazing place working on all kinds of community and education projects for the surrounding village. I helped "plaster" a mudbrick community center and edit a proposal for funding for an organic seed center program. Everyone eats meals together and I drank all the banana, for lack of a better word - moonshine, I need to this lifetime.
Wednesday, I went caving and "whitewater" kayaking down the river with a tour company. They made me wear a lifejacket and helmet even though the water levels are currently low enough that at points I hit rocks on the bottom and had to use my hands to move myself along. We stopped at a bar en route where I swung down a very homemade zip line into the water. Terrifying but a damn good time. Sadly, I managed to lose my watch and traveling alone without a watch in a place without many clocks is exceptionally challenging I'll have you know. You try catching a bus when you don't even know what time it is when you wake up. Anyway, I replaced it today and the only thing I could find is a hot little Kadio number that inexplicably has along the top of the digital face small icons of a rabbit, something that looks like Bambi, and a fairy, which all flash intermittently. It's completely random and a little creepy. Now I laugh every time I check the time. Maybe I was better off not knowing.
Anyway, yesterday I took a bus to Luang Prabang. The bus ride was hellishly curvy - the phenomenal beauty of the mountains was matched only by my phenomenal nausea - but entirely worth it. Luang Prabang is a beautiful town in northern Laos with pretty textiles, proper shops, very little dust, cute little houses, and a perfect atmosphere. See? Laos is lovely. If the computers weren't all 7000 years old I'd post pictures and prove it.
Love and miss you all.