Travel is Freedom! "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts." - Mark Twain

Out of the town of Luang Prabang, I spent two days on a nice trip....first mountain biking for 2 hours out to an elephant camp where we rode an elephant for an hour...I'd done it before so it wasn't that great, but the lodge was nice and I stayed out there for one night.  The next morning I got up at 6:30 to wash the elephants, which was VERY cool....I didn't know how fun that would be, but we rode out into the river on top of the elephant and then got off up to our chest and washed them with a brush.  Pretty fun, the elephant seemed to really like her bath!  But then something terrible happened, these other two tourists (riding the elephant completely alone with no mahout near them) got thrown off and one guy's head swelled up so bad, I felt soooo badly for him.  Then the mahouts were beating the elephant, putting a hook into her head and punishing her so much.  it was very violent, it really upset me.  The guy could have broken his neck.  But I saw him in town that night and he'd gone to a semi-hospital nearby and they told him he had a broken collarbone but his head was ok.  Whew!   In the afternoon we kayaked for 4 hours down the river, and I could have gotten SO MANY amazing photos but some of the time my camera was in the dry bag and then I ran out of film....oh well, I'm sure I got a couple of good ones out of the bunch that I took.  People all along the way were fishing and some kids were floating downstream on a log, laughing.  It was fun.  Yesterday I came about 8 hour bus-ride south through the mountains.  The mini-van was broken down most of the time, so we stopped in a lot of little villages and I got some great shots of kids and old people....my favorites!  I was happy that the van kept breaking down!  =)  Now I'm in Vang Vieng