Yes I am still around!

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Some of you may have been wondering what I have been up to since my last entry. Yes, once again I have been bad at keeping up to date with my stories, but hopefully I will be able to stick to my once a month update from now on. No promises though!

So….where do I begin? December was as expected a fairly crazy month. I found myself a house with plenty of room for guests so let me know if you are coming through. It is a wonderful house with a great garden and has what I am labeling the biggest mango tree in the world. Can’t wait till mango season and I can string up a hammock and lie there swinging away eating mango after juicy mango. My house is on the same road as a small temple, about 5 minutes from the nearest rice field, 15 minutes drive to work, and very close to a strange very lethal looking building that dominates the Russian compound.

I had my first birthday in Laos and I celebrated in a way that I suppose anyone might in Laos. I went bowling. Simone and her friend arrived in Vientiane the afternoon of my birthday and we headed out with a few other people to see what fun bowling could be. After selecting our funky shoes the teams were divided up and the games began. Although I had had some bowling practice before I left Australia, unfortunately, I don’t think it really helped me at all. Most of us were generally pretty hopeless, but there were some interesting bowling styles happening, from jumps, throws backwards, to collapsing on the floor bowls….

Xmas came and went in a typical find fellow expats and drink with them fashion and then new years saw more friends from Cambodia arriving for a new years holiday. Dan and Vireak arrived ahead of Jen and James who had been enjoying the “thousand islands” near the Cambodian border for a couple of days. Dan and James discovered the low cost and wonders that is Lao Lao (Lao whiskey), and we met a friend at a new years party who educated us on the wonders of the poor a cup of beer and pass it around the group party technique. This would have been fine if he hadn’t discovered that there was nothing stopping him pouring shots of Lao Lao into the cups of beer being passed around.

New years day was definitely recovery mode and we spent part of it sleeping, the rest sitting in a sauna and massage at a temple about 15 minutes walk from my house. The sauna is in this old traditional style Lao stilt house and you walk in and you can’t see a thing. Everything is just steam and darkness, and when I tried to find somewhere to sit down in typical Nami style I discovered exactly where all the other people were by stumbling over them, stepping on the holes that let the steam in and nearly burning my feet before finally finding a place to sit. We left this place completely relaxed, and I couldn’t believe I have this such a short walk from my house!

A lot of random things happened as well, which I suppose I should tell you about. For example, I went to a Lao/Korean Pop concert in the one and only concert hall here in Vientiane. A Lao star called Alexanda (Bulgarian-Lao girl) came out singing with dancers all around and then grabbed a violin and started playing while the dancers continued to bump and grind around her. A little unexpected, but definitely entertaining! Then the Korean pop star came onto the stage and the audience erupted into screams! I don’t even know if people really knew who he was but they were definitely happy he was there!

I was also lucky enought to catch up with a friend from Uni, Oumany and her family, while they were here on a very brief holiday. We went to the Nam Ngerm reservoir, ate more than we could handle, then wandered around a nearby zoo looking at the moss covered crocodiles, ostriches, feeding cucumbers to hippos, and of course checking out the kangaroo enclosure.

I have had a lot of travel up-country over the past 2 months taking visitors around to project sites, holding a workshop, developing new ideas with the teams for new projects which has definitely kept me a little busy. It is winter here, and so going up country has meant that, yes, I have actually had to wear my winter fleece. Maybe I have acclimatized a little too quickly. One of the places I have spent quite a bit of time in is Sayabouli, which is a province sort of north west of Vientiane. First fly to Luang Prabang, then drive for about 3 hours to Sayabouli town. There is a car ferry that goes over the Mekong at one point which reminded me a little of trips to Koh Kong once the real barge/boats started to be used. The Mekong flows just a touch faster though and it is always fun to watch how the boats combat the flow by going quite a way up stream and then maneuvering back downstream to the actual port. On my first trip there, some unfortunate man’s truck had stalled and broken down on the VERY steep slope leading to the point where cars get on and off the ferry. People kept putting small little rocks behind the wheels to stop it rolling into the river but they were always too small. Cars on the ferry couldn’t move because he was blocking the way, and cars waiting to get on were getting a little impatient. Finally someone grabbed a rope and towed the truck back up the hill.

A lot of the villages that CARE works with here are very remote with little road access. Laos is extremely mountainous and walking and/or river access is often the only way to get to some of the places we are implementing projects. I hope some of the photos can help to demonstrate just how mountainous this area is and give you a picture of what it is like here.

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