Laos

(exploring in Vang Vieng)

I took a bus from Hanoi (Vietnam) to Vientiane (Laos), taking about 20hrs. I've heard it referred to as the "bus from hell", but it really wasn't as bad as I expected. The only thing that was crazy was the amount of people they crammed on the bus, everytime we stopped to picked up passengers I was astonished. Most of the seats had 3 people jammed into two seats...and there were at least 20 people jammed sitting in the isle...it was crazy. BUT, we made it and it was cheap, that's all that matters.



Vientiane

Only stayed there for one day, didn't do much.

The crazy Swedes eating Swedish pizza at a Swedish pizzeria. This pizza has ham, banana, and curry....apparently it's a normal pizza in crazy Sweden (it was actually really good).



Vang Vieng

What a ridiculous place. It's super laid back, made for backpackers to come and hang out with eachother while pretty much doing nothing. MOST of the restaurants play re-runs of "friends".....ALL DAY! The tubing is kind of fun though, even though there really isn't much tubing to do. You start on the river, and about 50metres away is the first bar. There are about 8 bars along the way, each with ropeswings that are sketchy to say the least. This would never be allowed in North America...feed a bunch of backpackers buckets of alcohol, then encourage them to climb up a sketchy ladder to a sketchy platform and swing off a rope into a river that is only a few feet deep at times. Never-the-less, I had fun trying backflips on the ropeswings. No pictures from tubing as me+water+camera=bad, but Klara brought a camera one day so there is one vid that I put on facebook. Another day we (I've been hanging out with a couple from Sweden, we met on the "bus from hell") rented motorbikes and searched out the area finding some cool caves. Yeah, that's about it.

Hehehe, we found some AWESOME BeerLao shirts in an amazing color...I call it electric salmon. We rented bikes with baskets and bells and rode around feeling pretty special.

Exploring caves.

A mid-afternoon lagoon dip...




Luang Prabang

Cool city. I really like Laos, the people are much more friendly than Vietnam, and it's WAY more laid back. Today we (me, the Swedes, and Julian - from California) went for a walk around the city to see some sites. We found a trail that went down a hill, then crossed this sketchy bamboo bridge and swam in the river with the local kids...and a bunch of monks...strange. We searched farther on, I'm guessing no tourists get that far, we found a school and bought some pepsi in a bag with the kids at recess. It was awesome :) Oh yeah, it's coming up to the New Year here in Laos, which is celebrated in a water festival....basically it just means getting everyone wet. The New Year isn't for another week, but people were out in full force today, including a group of monks! Sssooo, we bought some really big waterguns and soaked the monks, that was also awesome :) Tomorrow we check out some cool waterfall, then head North somewhere.


Me coming out of an attempted front flip, swimming with monks and kids in the Mekong River in Luang Prabang.


A monk....possibly reflecting on monk things.


The Swedes, Julian, and me in Luang Prabang.