And the winner for the most scenic country on my journey so far…Laos. What a beautiful place!

I arrived in Vientiane, Laos. Renting a bicycle for the day, I cycled to all the recommended sites and along the Mekong River. It was a peaceful and enjoyable day  cruising from place to place. Spa and massage services were cheap here. I did some shopping, got a massage, and enjoyed a nice lunch. The night market on the river was a busy place.

You know when you study a language, and they say you’re fluent once you’ve dreamed in that language? Well, I had a dream the other night, and it was full of rice paddies. What’s that mean?

From Vientiane, I took a four to five hour bus ride to Vang Vieng. It a small town set up for tourists, but if you go just a bit outside the city there are many different rural “back to the basics” type villages. The men of the village are allowed to have multiple wives, but if the women get caught with another man they are killed.

I did a day tour to four caves, tubing down the river, and had dinner watching the sun going behind the beautiful mountains. One of the caves was a water cave. We tubed by rope through the small tight cave for a long ways, and then we rode the water’s current back out of the cave.

My dorm room had ants in the bed, so I switched to another dorm after the first night. There were two guys in there, and I helped them picked out their shirts for their big night out because they had met some Dutch girls that they wanted to impress.

The bus ride from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang was one of the most beautiful and heavenly drives I have ever done. We were packed tightly in a minibus, luggage strapped to the top, and people were vomiting into bags because the curves were so bad. Before we left, the driver had been looking under the hood of the minibus (which really gave me a lot of confidence for the six hour ride ahead). The mountains, rice paddies, and villages were spectacular and full of color. Wow! I didn’t want it to end…and it didn’t. Going up a particularly steep hill, the engine did a big “clunk clunk” and our six hour journey turned into a ten hour journey. I was impressed that the driver was able to identify the problem after pulling a bunch of parts out of the hood. He hitched a ride to the next village, got help and bus parts, and they were able to fix the minibus without us changing to another one. Still, the day was wonderful thanks to the views. We arrived at dark to Luang Prabang, and it started to rain. Some of us from the bus tried to walk to a cheap place to sleep that I found in my Lonely Planet book, but it must have closed down. Two of the people broke off to find another place, and the remainder guy and I got a tuk tuk to a busier area where I was able to find a guest house. I stayed in a private room for $7 a night for the next three nights. We had a quick dinner, and I learned that he was in the film and photography business. He created short documentaries.

Luang Prabang was a very charming city, with European style buildings and quaint shops and streets. The city itself is a UNESCO site, and it is a peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan Rivers. Surrounding the city there were many adventures to do (waterfalls, caves, elephant riding, village treks, etc.), but I’d been doing those types of things for the last four months. I decided to enjoy the city by finding good food, good markets, and a couple of massages. It was nice to have some down time is such an easy place, and it was great to stay in the same spot for more than two nights in a row.