Luang Prabang Pied Piper Trip

Hi Everyone!
A quick message to Mike and Joan, could you go up to our place and go onto our Entourage address book and look up Kevin Brown's e-mail address and forward it to this blog. I believe it is, hartworl@yahoo, could you confirm or correct. We are trying to meet him here. Thank you.

We haven't been very brave about eating the street food here. Luke, the man we met yesterday had intestine tonight and told us it like flavoured rubber. When we were in Bangkok, Tim from Australia took us to a Lao restaurant. The experience was fabulous, dancers, men fighting with swords, causing sparks to fly everywhere and a band playing Laotian music. People sat at big long tables in a warehouse building that had been converted into Lao restuarant. When we were handed the menu, 6 pages long, I could only find 3 or 4 items that I was willing to eat. Ants eggs, snake head, minced frog pate, crispy duck's beak, chicken's legs, blood sausage, and roasted liver just didn't appeal to me. We did order morning glory (the weed) and some kind of seafood dish. I would say we left rather hungry. Hence our reluctance to eat street food.

Today, we decided to venture forth into the hills around Luang Prabang so we joined up with the two men we met yesterday. We drove through the countryside on undeveloped roads to some waterfalls. We were in the back of a pick-up and were often left in the dust by the sleek Toyoto air conditioned vans going to the same destination. Fortunately we were with Simi, who was like our own private Loation tour guide. We saw farmers plowing their rice paddies with water buffalo and many very poor shanty villages covered in dust from all the traffic going by to the falls.

Our driver took it upon himself to stop at a small village and we wondered why. It became clearer when we were surrounded by lots small smiling children who took us to a gate in a wire fence. There we paid 10,000 kip (10 cents), we were led through a field to a thatch covered stage area which was dried packed mud. We had little red plastic chairs to sit on, the four of us, and the children commenced their performance. They were dressed in Lao traditional costumes. The program consisted of: spinning large tops, shooting arrows at targets, girls and boys throwing balls at each other while singing, playing a tune on a piece of grass and bambo flute. Not exactly a world class stage show but we enjoyed it immensely; especially the scruffy little children that swarmed us after the performance when the first candy made it's appearance! We were almost sad to leave, as we drove away, the children waved madly at us and some even shouted good bye. We wondered if tooth brushes would have been a better gift.

Good night, David and Carol

P.S. It is warm and dry, cool at nights. Kevin, we continue to go to the JoMa cafe. Our hotel is called the Saysamone, which is right on the road on the Mekong River. We will be there several more nights (Friday and Saturday) and will probably move to another guest house. We keep looking for you. By the way I lost my hat, so look for a bare head. David

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