Banlung!

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Hello!!

I really am dying of hunger now so I'm going to make these last few blogs really really quick ones!!

Banlung was fun, but in hindsight maybe not quite worth the number of days it took out of our travelling time with getting there and back! The town and market was fun to wander around although we were practically red after each visit into town because of the layer of red dust/dirt which coats the town!

On the only full day we had there, we went on a moped tour we organised with our hostel and visited waterfalls and a crater lake, although the highlight was definitely the fact that we opted to do part of the tour on an elephant instead of on the moped! The elephant was really cool - so huge but cute! :o) The trek was mainly on a dirt road through the jungle, with a few diversions into the jungle so the elephant could eat (and boy could he eat.... loads.... and his trunk was so strong - he was practically pulling out trees by the roots!!) - it took about an hour and a half but to be honest that was plenty of time! The novelty does wear off after a while and it starts to get a bit boring as it's very very slow and it can be quite uncomfortable sitting on top of the elephant in the wooden basket for so long! I didn't find it too bad (I think mainly because I was in my element of animal-interaction) but Michi found it really uncomforable almost from the very beginning and after a while I had to agree..... it was also very bumpy/swaying up there and I was glad when we finally arrived as I was starting to feel really sick hehe! It was really cool though and I'm really glad we did it! :o)

There were a lot of local families swimming (fully clothed - it's not really normal for girls to wear bikinis here!) at one of the waterfalls we went to after our elephant ride and some of the children were so scared/nervous of the German hostel owner who had come with us that he had to leave and wait for us back by the mopeds! Apparently it was because he is so big and white and not many of the local children are accostomed to seeing white people so they think they are ghosts! Although they didn't seem to be as scared of Michi and I, maybe because I was providing the day's entertainment by firstly (and very ungracefully.... even with help from my moped driver) trying to climb in a vine I had seen someone else sitting in and then ofcourse getting stuck (it was too high up and I couldn't jump down because the water was sooo shallow and the rocks were really sharp)! :o( Luckily a local helped me because Michi was too busy taking pictures and laughing to be of any help whatsoever! :o) Oh well, at least I made all the locals laugh, even if they were laughing at me instead of with me! :o) When we were leaving that waterfall and heading towards the crater lake we watched 2 very very very drunk men on a moped trying to drive but only managing to drive straight into trees which made me a bit nervous driving around after that incase everyone else on mopeds were drunk too and about to crash in to us!

The next day, we got the long, tedious and very very cramped minibus back to Stung Treng and then on to the Laos border (after a rather heated discussion/arguement between Michi and the hotel owner who was trying to rip us off again for the second time.... so we ended up walking all the way across town in the boiling midday heat with all our bags just to pay the exact same price in another hostel just upon principle of not giving any more money to the rude hotel owner! hehe!)!

xxxxxx

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