Broken Bus, Mongoose For Sell, & Fabulous Luang Prabang

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I began my journey to Luang Prabang with my first ever solar heated shower & bus load of 45 wazungus (vocab lesson for the day...wazungu is Swahili for white people & just seems so very appropriate when touring around with loads of them). Anyway, we crawled through the mountains of Northern Laos planning on a ride that would last about 7-8 hours. 14 hours later, numerous sightings of mongoose, deer & rodents for sale, our radiator overheating, briefing losing the driver & a few bags of potato chips, we arrived in Luang Prabang via a substitute bus decked out with crazy colors, cracked ceilings & most importantly, Thai music videos. I did have the pleasure of talking to Laura Lee a girl in the Peace Corps in China and got quite an education as to her experience with communism & how it affects the country. By the time we actually got to LP, it was 11 PM and there was no room at the inn--that is inns plural & we spent the next hour walking around trying to find a place to rest our heads. Moral of the story...avoid buses that breakdown...ha ha!

The next morning I spent my time wondering if my carpe diem, "what will be will be" attitude during travel just might have kicked me in the butt--I had no money. And, no that does not mean no problem. To make matters worse, the singular ATM didn't like my card. 6 tries later it was jackpot time. Out came the kip & I felft like I was in Vegas baby, Vegas!

I do suppose the time comes, however, when you travevl in developing countries, that your conscious gets to you and you question whether "seeing" the world & exploring these countries benefits anyone but yourself & suddenly you feel like a complete voyeur in another culture. Giving nothing & takng everything. For me I know it is mostly chaulked up to the language barrier & I find myself constantly frustrated with the fact that I cannot get past hello & goodbye. I suppose that is par for the course brought on only by my own idealistic traveling dreams, but nonetheless, it is frustrating. The glorious news is that quite a few locals in LP speak English. Enter Dr. Nou, a 70 year old do-gooder that sat & talked to Jesse & I for about an hour yesterday. He spoke of his stint as a monk & devotion to Buddhism. He recounted a story as a POW during the war with Vietnam & his 10 days of hunger. Every night he prayed to Buddha & in his dreams a large dark image appeared & fed him feasts of plenty. The next day he felt no hunger. Crazy stuff. One of his more impressive attributes was that he spoke 4 different languages--Lao, Thai, French & English. Wow.

And I polished off the night with a few Beer Lao Bombs...buckets of beer lao, lao-lao & a red bull mixture. Disgusting! But once again Jesse & I got to hang out with the lovely Canadian couple, Eric & Tamiko.

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