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 DAY EIGHTEEN - Temples & Waterfalls, Laos

Previous Blogs: Day 1 Tokyo | Day 2 Tokyo | Day 3 & 4 Singapore | Day 5 Singapore | Day 6 Ho Chi Minh City | Day 7 Ho Chi Minh City & Tunnels

Day 8 Can Tho | Day 9 Floating Market | Day 10 Flower Market | Day 11 Hoi An | Day 12 My Son Temple | Day 13 Hanoi | Day 14-16 Halong Bay

Day 17 Luang Prabang | Day 18 Temples-Waterfalls | Day 19 Mekong River | Day 20-21 Bagan | Day 22 Bagan | Day 23 Inle | Day24-25 Inle

Day 26-27 Finale

Click photos for a larger image...

Spent a pleasant night at the hotel, not a lot of TV to watch even though they have BBC and a couple movie channels, the reception was too poor to watch. The only channel in English clear enough was the Japanese English news channel called HKN - I can't help wondering why the Japanese need an international English channel????

Today we woke up to pouring rain and freezing temps. Yesterday was a balmy 85F, but the high today was barely 50F. Brrrrr!

Thus our planned boat trip was cancelled. So we started off with a rainy tour of the city. Being pretty small it didn't take that long. Our poor tour guide was really battling with ideas on things to do in the rain.

This is an outdoorsy country!

Picture on the left is the dashboard of our SUV - our driver clearly Buddhist, has his own shrine in the vehicle. Finally the rain let up enough to visit a couple of temples.

There are 36 temples in this town!

This is a bamboo bridge built just for the dry season to get across the river. Once the monsoons come in the bridge gets washed away, and then they rebuild it after rainy season again

Here's another one - it costs 50 cents to a $1 to cross the bridge (unless you are a monk, they cross for free!)

We ran into a Japanese film crew shooting a documentary - why SO MANY cameras??

Running out of ideas with the rain, the tour guide took us to an ethnic museum.  It was very interesting and a sticking resemblance to patterns see in Peru amongst the Andean peoples.

The rain set in again, so we went back to the hotel for the rest of the morning. I watched a movie while Wendy slept - she wasn't feeling too well, cold coming on and a tooth ache from an open nerve.

They came back to pick us up at 1.30 as the rain had mostly cleared, it was just yucky overcast and cold, but we could still go to see the waterfall and the countryside.

The countryside is beautiful...

Rice paddies everywhere!

But nothing prepared us for the magnificence of the waterfall...

Strolled through the local market...

Fish... ON A STICK!

Then it was time to visit a local village.

Coming down the mountain you can see the city in the distance

Arrived back in time to relax before dinner.

We lucked on a restaurant that had its own cats. She was quite demanding for food!  So was the cat!

Once again, an excellent meal for the two of us for less than $10

 

And finally...

 
If you are going to cook chicken on a stick... there really is no need to take the feet off, you can just chew around them.

Grossed out? Well, instead why not just have a bag of chips instead:

Would you prefer Crab Curry flavor? Or is Japanese Seaweed more to your taste?