Villa Maydou Luang Prabang

... off to vehicular traffic and a couple of hundred merchants set up the night market. Picture a kilometer of street covered by red awnings, softly illuminated by incandescent lightbulbs. All the merchandise is displayed on the ground and as you walk through the stalls, you can calmly admire the goods without a single word of harassment. It's truly beguiling and we want to buy everything in sight! Soft silk clothing, lanterns made of mulberry paper, linens of ...

... to some of the people they were traveling with (they had ran into a girl that hey studied abroad with in London four years prior and were traveling with her for the next few days) and then invited us to have dinner with them. They had decided on one of the cold vegetarian buffets, which they claimed they had the night before and was really good. We figured for the price of sixty cents, we could definitely try it. The buffet ended up being really delicious (no refills on the dish but it was ...

... Mekong River, one of the largest rivers in Asia. Plenty of construction activity as the countries of Burma and Laos allow gambling. You can see many casinos under construction and of course, the giant Buddha being built first to bring prosperity to the regions.<br><br>My favorite was the introduction of Laos whiskey. Several different varieties to sample which included cobras, scorpions, armadillos ...

... the<br>swelling to my inner ear down so I didn&#8217;t feel as if I was hearing<br>everything while under water.<br>The Views from the Bus window were even more Spectacular than<br>promised with crops of limestone rising hundreds of feet into the air<br>in rows as far as the eye could see, even the fact that for the whole<br>Journey we travelled in what seemed a continuous downward spiral with<br>the bus driver playing a tune on the horn the whole way ...

... to join this man. I did. He seemed (and was) utterly harmless. <br><br>The toothless guy's home<br>He took me across the river in his boat, and up to his home. It was a stone house and quite big for Lao standards, but the inside was not decorated at all, just concrete, and things lying about randomly everywhere. It had no doors but faded curtains to shut the rooms off from the main living space. He made me sit down, and his daughter and ...

After the journey on the worlds most windy road it was a welcome relief to get to Luang Prabang, this is a relatively sleepy place especially if you compare this with the party and adventure town of Vang Vieng.<br>There are just a couple of main roads here that run in parallel with the ...

... Beetle being about the size of a cicada, rolling dung the size of a golf ball, but this little guy (gal?) was only about a half an inch tall and his/h** little ball of dung was not much bigg** than a pea! The only reason why I spotted him was because I was putting down food for the kittens when I noticed a tiny, round, brown mass wobbling past my foot. <br><br><br> <br>(photo from the Int**net)<br><br>It turns out that th**e are ov** 400 diff ...

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... talking on their cell phones, or in stores. You can&#8217;t talk to a monk unless on talks to you first. If you do they need to go through days of cleansing. We did have one monk say hello in a bit weird manner&#8230; he was more like&#8230; Hellllo. We hiked up to Phu Si which is over 250 steps to the top of the mountain which houses That Chomsi which is used for the Buddhist New Year celebration. After that we walked around the night market which ...

... and extracted a sleepy youth who indicated to us in sign language that there was no way we could come aboard. Seemingly this was a newly-outfitted boat for upper-crust tourists to cruise up and down the river; probably the first of its kind. Regretfully we gave in, having decided that to travel at lightspeed by speedboat, the new generation of Mekong boats, didn't really fit in with our romantic notions about gently cruising down this vast and unspoiled river.<br><br>Jon and Paula ...