Flying into Luang Prabang in Laos is watching a dream unfold. The desire to see this country has been brewing for twenty years, and the sight of the lush green hills rising sharply to our plane brings a smile to our faces. Fabulously beautiful place. Bloody hard to find a room since it's the holiday season but luckily sister Barb and Ernie saved us one from the night before. Missed them by a day, funny eh? Days of breakfasts by the sleepy river, dinners watching surreal sunsets over the Mekong, beautiful night market (where Bruce had fun shopping), excellent food and the stunning Wat Xieng Thong with it's tremendous glass piece mosaics make Luang Prabang a tremendously restful place.
Spend New Years Day on the back of a beautiful elephant, sauntering through the jungle and across a river. I'm hooked! Must buy an elephant for the farm back home. She drops us off on the riverbank for a bamboo raft back to camp....now that's relaxing.
Four hours north of Luang Prabang through beautiful mountain valleys we find dusty and sleepy Nong Khiew, and our first thatched roof bungalow by the river. Nearly perfect place to hang out for...well...could be a long time. Probably will be when we come back to in Laos. Most people come here to take the hour long river cruise to a little village north, but we heard that it's like a tourist town now and actually Nong Khiew is the "village" life now. And it is. Quiet and surrounded by awesome mountains here we watch the hours go by, and go by they do, as the children tumble down the sandy banks into the river below and women wash their laundry and bodies in the streams.
Well, another Asia travel day. 1 hour by bus, 2 1/2 hours by pickup, 3 1/2 hours by bus, and finally 10km by pickup gets us to Luang Namtha, in northwest Laos and at the edge of the Golden Triangle. Here, of course, I get offered opium. Ahhh, no thanks, I'm tramquil enough right now...but I'll take another bracelet! The journey to here shows us some lovely and not so lovely villages, and it is where we feel Laos could use some/our help.
At first it seemed like, "Why are we here?", but after a few days of cycling and scootering about the countryside through villages and rice fields we find it quite liveable. Smiles from parents of playing children make us feel welcome as we help distribute locally produced books which improve the children's literacy and English. We like this part of the world very much. Four hours through forested hills we end up crossing the mighty Mekong into Thailand!
