| ~ Laos ~
travel plan: "let's see what happens next..."- Theme song: "On the road again. (and again...)"
- Longest time on bus: 22 hours
- Favorite food: fruit shakes and banana chocolate pancakes
- You know you have been in Asia too long...when you complain about having to pay eight dollars a night for a hotel room.
We had a great trip to Laos. We pretty much trekked across from one end to the other. Which meant bus rides, beautiful scenery, new people, a new greeting, (subiedee!) bus rides, fruit shakes (highly recommended) playing with kids  , a boat ride, a bus ride, shopping, a bus ride, and THEN... back to IGo! Now, I'm sure I missed a bus ride or two in their somewhere... Our grand total hours of travel was 68 hrs. on bus and 5 by boat! Quite the journey!
The mountains were absolutely beautiful! Unfortunately, I spent much of my time on the bus encouraging my stomach to behave and let me enjoy my trip. We still have some issues to work through.
This is my team - On the ledge, Alex and Becky, then Phil, Arlin, and Naomi.
On this day we only had to catch our bus at 4:30 p.m. so we spent the day exploring. It was HOT! When I put my thermometer on this ledge it registered 114 F! Our major discovery was - fruit shakes! They are absolutely the best in Laos.We should know, we had seventeen of them that day! We caught our bus later, (barely) and stayed on it overnight until 2:30 the next afternoon.
Becky and I decided that pineapple/banana shakes are by far the best!
We arrived after twenty two hours on the bus and found a hotel, only to discover that we only
got running water twice a day. Imagine: bus + 22 hrs. + dust + no shower = umm...
not very pretty. The view from the hotel was fantastic though.
 This
was probably our favorite day of the whole trip. We had found a
basketball court and while the guys played with some of the locals
Becky, Nome, and I blew up balloons and sang with the kids. It was
great to have contact with the people. The kids were precious, but shy.  These
two little girls promptly stole my heart. The one on the right would
stand right beside me and watch me the whole time we sang, trying to
imitate everything we were doing. She got pretty good at
Head-n-shoulders-knees-n-toes.
Just in case I hadn't mentioned it, we had a lot of bus rides. This bus is representing all of its kin.
 To
save time, we took a boat part of the way back to meet the rest of the
team. The boat
was definitely a lot faster, but noisy. We couldn't hear each other speak and when singing began to develop a remarkable ability to read lips.We passed a lot of little villages like this and even stopped to buy some sting
rays off of a lady on the bank.
We
finally got back and were reunited with the other half of the team.
While we had been trekking all over the country they had been taking
naps, digging holes, and planting rice. We shopped, and then got on our
last overnight bus ride.
On the road again...
Chiang Mai, here we come!!!
|
The land... 
