Living Large in Laos

I think this is a big rice barge but your guess is as good as mine


My buddy from Isreal on the boat, I'll never remember his name, it's very Hebrew

This little guy was incredibly curious about my headphones so I let him at check them out for a while...

Thats a fistfull of Kip, mostly 20,000kip notes... About $2 each

Hello from Laos! Still internet Cafes everywhere..The bus ride from Pai to Chiang Kahn was rediculous. We were supposed to arive around 6:00am for some breakfast before crossing into Laos, my guess is that the bus driver had a deal with the guesthouse where we were supposed to eat breakfast because we arrived around 3:30am, so everyone needs a room for a couple hours. Besides feeling worked over a little it was no big deal to pay for the room. The bad part was the bus ride itself, there was absolutley NO WAY to sleep on that bus, so for 5 hours or so we were bouncing up and down, peeling around corners at mach 10. Our driver was driving like it was a one lane road, and he was on some sort of time trial. Nobody slept. Well the group survived, and made it into Laos. Soon after arriving in Laos some 100 people boarded the slow boat for a two day trip down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang. The boat ride was great, met tones of people, even found a way to escape the crowd and crawl around to the bow where I soaked up some sun by myself for a while before being joined by Smiley, at least I think that was his name. We stopped at a little town "Pakbenge" for the night and walked into the middle of the last day of the festival I wrote about earlier, except this is rural Laos, and these people were drunk and armed with all sorts of firecrackers. It was pretty bizzare really, the boat pulls in and theres a big crowd of locals on the shore/hillside throwing these firecrackers amongst themselves, laughing, having a good time, but these firecrackers were loud, and fairly large, no one wanted to be first to get off the boat into the crossfire, but we did, and made a dash for it. Pretty exciting really. Later that night, after dinner I went for a walk with a couple of Irish girls and it became a dash, a run. I can only imagine since the locals seemed to enjoy throwing these little bombs at each other the thrill of tossing a few at some tourists must be tenfold, I had two go off right by me, one I could feel right by my foot the other was airborn a couple feet away. It sounds a bit more dangerous than it really was, but what a laugh we had running back and forth up this hill looking in every direction for incoming firecrackers.

I've been a bit sick for three days or so, but really am doing fine and trying to take it easy. The doctor said it was Tonselities+ an upper airway infection or something fun like that. I was realieved to visit a clinic and hear that my achy feverish caugh was easily treated by a five day course of antibiotics, and wasn't anything too serious. I'm about half way through with my meds. and feel so much better already. I'm going to a steam sauna tonight and I'll sweat it out a bit.

I changed out 2,700Baht earlier today (80ish US) and recieved roughly 750,000kip. It really seems like monopoly money, I'm definitly not used to it, all I know is that dinner for two last night at a fancy little indian restraunt with a couple drinks and appitisers cost 93,000kip. I'm not used to kip and thought I had seriously blown the budget, that was a shock, then I realized it was just under $10 US, strange really, well I'm out for now, Adios,

Adam