Leaving Luang Prabang

The posse.

I believe it will have been four nights here and we are ready to leave this relaxing resort type town. We ate some delicious food and the scenery is amazing but it felt like I didn’t even leave Canada since I was surrounded by so much western food and upscale resort type guest houses. 

Today was an eventful day since the past couple days we have been laying low due to Karrie’s short term illness.  Don’t worry she is fine and healthy and we are heading out back to Vang Vieng for a round two because our visas to Cambodia and Vietnam, since it is much cheaper there and we are not making another pit stop in Vientiane on our way down south to the islands. 

In the morning we grabbed breakfast and then off to rent bikes. Okay so to rent a bike it costs about 2 dollars Canadian. Instead of leaving our passports as collateral we decided to leave some Canadian dollars behind. I find it strange that the more East we travel the more they want American dollars. (ex. on receipts here they print off the total in Kips, US, Baht and I can’t remember what the last one is.) 

The bike story, Karrie’s breaks didn’t work so well, my front breaks sounded like dying piggy’s when I used them and one of my bike petals was going to fall off all day but didn’t.  Our attempts to fix it were futile.  

Whatever we already rented them for the day, off to go biking with the camera. Down the river side we saw a million palm trees, upscale guest houses and a ton of river side restaurants. Today was surprisingly windy.  We made a pit stop for some yummy mango sticky rice and veggie spring rolls and off to find our bus tickets for tomorrow. As we park our bikes and lock them up to hit up some travel agencies the lock broke and when I say broke I mean the bikes are locked together and the part where the key goes in had come right out springs and all. WTF? Off to find the guy he uses a screw driver and we are free once again.

In the evening we meet up with our posse (all 7 of us) for one last dinner and some drinks at a place called Utopia. We do have to say we loved this part of our journey with them; they were fantastic travel buddies that weren’t over bearing and tons of fun to hang out with. I even got a free book, I love books! A nice dinner and beers at a river side restaurant and bar then off to another place for some more drinks, ended up drinking wine outside on the main street to say our last good-byes. Somewhere in the city there were people setting off mini hot air balloons I never found out why I wonder if it is the same as when they do it in China. (I drank my apple juice it was so darn yummy) 

One of the biggest tress I have ever seen.

Karrie was sad to say good-bye to the people we have grown to love over the past few days, I know that I have just kind of gotten use to saying them so often in the past two years I don’t think about it much. She is sensitive for the both of us in this particular matter. The walk home was cold...it think it was about 18C we were wearing sweaters and scarves, talk about getting climatize quickly.