Philaylack Villa Luang Prabang

... James again, who by this time we had started to think they were stalking us or us stalking them, one of the two anyway!<br><br>After a bit more wandering around we decided to go back to our guesthouse for a good nights sleep! It was just gone 11 and we drove through the night market, it was a ghost town and so eerie, just rubbish littering the streets and blowing in the wind, with so few lights the spookiness was even greater!<br>

... mat content was minimal, and the bone/gristle content high. Rubbish.<br><br>After our meal we had a wander down the street to look at the myriad stalls selling all manner of intriguing tat; the road went on for ages and it took us a good fifteen minutes to cover it all. Most of the stalls were selling the same tat actually, so you ended up feeling like you were trapped in an endless loop. Once we'd broken out of it, we waled back to the street down the road from the hostel ...

... enough but the longer we were out the more people caught up with us and we had great craic, flying off the massive water slides or the monkey swings into the water. We didnt escape without injury or bruises and we got back before dark but it was deadly!!<br><br>After that we went to Vientaine - the capital (funny how that isnt even on google earth!) Its a nice quiet enough place with loads of places to see and eat in. The food in ...

... found a wonderful local place with a really cheap menu. We stuffed ourselves with eggs, noodle soup, stir fry, coffee, tea and juice - all for about five pounds. <br>We wondered around the palace museum for an hour and wondered what to do next.<br>We decided to hire bikes and try to cycle back to the waterfall so that Tom could take photos. At first we couldn't hire any, as they all wanted passports as security for the bikes....but ours were in the safe. We tried to ...

... mottled cat, named Piglet, with a face straight out of a Picasso painting, has 2 kinks in the tail. The orange one, Christoph**, has a kink at the tip which makes it look like a bob tail. The 3rd one, Winnie, is the only one with the normal straight tails that we are used to seeing. The kinked tail is a well-known phenomenon in Asian cats, and supposedly mentioned by Charles Darwin in his writings. It is consid**ed a genetic abnormality possibly ...

... were no injuries :-) It was so nice there (cool and refreshing turquoise waters) we stayed for ages. We will post some pics soon.<br><br>Took a slow ride on the bike back through some local villages, to get a good idea of what everyday Laos life is like.<br><br>We were going to get the VIP bus out from Luang Prabang to Van Vieng the next day, but unfortunately I was feeling quite a bit worse for wear with a dodgy belly again (still). So ...

... however I also saw tourists in tank tops and shorts (which is a dress no-no for monks) giving Ums to them. Also, the rice that is sold on the street isn&#8217;t considered high quality rice and the monks really don&#8217;t like it. They won&#8217;t turn it down but they don&#8217;t like it. Tourists are even encouraged NOT to buy rice from people selling it on the streets, but I guess some people just don&#8217;t listen.

... remove the shoes. This is especially true in temples and perhaps of utmost importance in the most ancient royal temple of Luang Prabang. This Italian didn't. A monk rushed forward to protest, clearly unused to protesting about anything, to which the Italian replied "Hey, man, chill out a bit", and ruffled the young monk's stubbly hair, thus adding insult to injury as the head is the most holy part of the body and something that shouldn't be touched on any account. This breach of ...