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Published: October 24th 2006
Sa bai dee! Or hello to you. Hope you lot is all well and 'appy.
As you may have guessed we've just spent two and a half days in a jungle paradise. We went north from Luang Prabang by bus for a few hours then caught a boat to Muanf Ngoi which is in the middle in nowhere. The bus ride was beautiful. We went past lots of pretty little villages. They are made up of lots of wooden houses on stilts, each with thier own little gardens....each with their own huge satalite dish.......
The boat ride was even better. Every village we went past had kids playing in the river and there where buffalos having baths to. The river also runs between mountians so it's amazing scenery. When we arrived we headed straight to a guest house. The room we ended up in was a beach hut type thing with a balcony and hamock that looked stright out onto the river and mountians beyond.............. It's made for sitting staring at the view all day or reading books.
The whole place is basicaly one small street and the other tourists are very well hidden. On our first day
we only saw two other white people. We were the only people staying in our guesthouse, which was rather sad as they are all so desperate for tourists but there are just too many guesthouse and cafes. We have found this all everywhere we've been in laos so far. It's a pretty poor country.
On the upside it meant that we were pretty much just living with the family rather than staying in a guest house. The bathroom we used was the family one and they all came and sat with us on the balcony in the evenings and talked. There were four generations living there from grandma to baby greatgrandaughter. They were all lovely and we managed to talk even though only the grandaughter spoke english. We learnt some Lao though. This wasn't without it's misunderstandings though. At one point we thought they were saying 'don't get bitter by posionous spiders', however.....after some drawing we realised that it was actually ' we don't have crabs in this river'. At least we got there in the end.
On the first day Sam went out fishing with a boy we had met the night before and I lazed around
mostly then went to explore the place. I just kept walking round going 'wow, wow, wow' it's so beautiful. The people are also really friendly. It's different from other tourist places in that people still go about thier daily jobs like working in the fields, chopping wood and cooking becuase no one can live off the tourist
industry.
In the afternoon we went to some nearby caves that invlove a 30 min walk along the vally, past rice paddies and through the jungle. The caves are lovely too. One of them has a lovely clear stream in it so you can wade into the cave. Someone had put a candle in there too. Under the candle someone had carved J + S....spooky......
On the second day we hired a guide for a one day walk. It was a very easy walk to a village beyond the cave. We could have done it on our own but it was worth paying aguide. He told us about allt he plants and what people use them for. They have ones for testing if you have malaria! Then plants for headaches, breathing problems, bowel probelms, etc etc. Who needs Glaxosmithkline hey? At
the village we chilled out for a while and had lunch.
The place we stayed only have electirsity for four hours a night and that packed up on the seconf night so we ended up reading by candle light and going to bed early.
This moring we came back to Luang Prabang and tomorrow we go to Vang Vieng. I would write more but I'm still all relaxed so look at the photos and enoy.
Take care all.
BTW Racheal Gurrrrrr is in india now and she is blogging on this site to incase you didn't know. She is itsalljustmakebelieve.
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helen
non-member comment
great to see your photos. nice to MSN with sam. this looks like the bit of your trip that i would really like love to you both