Vang Vieng, Laos

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Hello from Vang Vieng, Laos! We arrived here yesterday afternoon after a seven hour bus ride from Luang Prabang. The ride was through the mountains on very windy roads. The scenery was beautiful, although Laos is very smoky right now as it is the season when the farmers burn their fields in preparation for spring planting. It limits the visibility, but also makes things look strangely misty which is cool too.

Once again, we have a great hotel wityh an amazing view from the back deck. We sat out there for a while in the late afternoon enjoying cold Beer Lao and awesome views.

In our initial walk around town yesterday, Catherine, Tricia, and I found an Irish Bar (called The Irish Bar) and we convinced most of the group to go there for dinner and drinks. It was packed and a bit loud, but it was fun to watch those who had celebrated a bit too much make fools of themselves. We three were good as we had an ear;y AM planned for today.

There's not a lot to do in Vang Vieng and the most popular activities are mountian biking, caving, kayaking, and tubing. We got up early and rented mountain bikes to go exploring some of the limestone caves. W biked about 7km to Buddha Cave. The roads are just dirt and they are rocky so it was a rough ride. We had a (seemingly) long climb up to the cave that was more difficult than the ride there. The cave was fairly spacious and Tricia had a flashlight so we made good progress. We stopped when we reached a point where there was a ladder that went down, but you could not see the bottom of it and couldn't tell what happened if/when you hit the bottom. We went to the nearly Blue Lagoon for a bit of a rest. It would have been a nice swimming spot and it was a great place to rest for a few minutes. It's surrounded by planted fields with cows and sheep in the pastures plus dramatic scenery in the background. We were headed to explore other caves when Catherine had a tire blow out so we walked the 5km or so back into town. She exchanged her bike and we rode around town for a while then had lunch and hit the internet.

The connection is slow here so I'll stop now and put some photos up. More soon!

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