Thanksgiving in Laos and a sad goodbye to the Franks

11/25-26 Took the crazy nightbus to luang prabang. The bus driver and conductors both had ak-47 machine guns with them b/c apparently the night bus in this region can often get raided.

11/26 Thanksgiving! We arrived bright and early into Luang Prabang in time to see the huge procession of brightly orange clad monks collecting their food alms in the morning. Luang Prabang is a world heritage city for its well preserved french era architecture and plethora of temples. It's at the confluence of the mekong and some other river. It's a really nice city with the rivers, perfect weather and temps, clean and quiet streets, and laid back feel. A bit boring, but in a good way. A place my parents would really like with its chic cafes, great bakeries, good french and european food, art galleries, tourist markets, and just sort of classy vibe. Most of the tourists seemed to be affluent and of middle age or older. We just walked around and saw a bit of the city in the morning and got our baguettes and fruit shakes. In the afternoon we took a tuk tuk up to Tat Kuangsi Waterfall, which was a multi tiered fall of incredibly beauty similar to erawan falls in thailand. A couple huge falls and then lots of small cascades and sweet pools made even better by the cool blue milky color of the water. We hiked up to the top of the falls and then came back down to swim in the pools and do some waterfall jumping. I'll never get over how sweet the little pools and falls in limestone karsts areas are. Just like a disneyland fairies' wonderland.

Back in town that evening we had the task of trying to put together a thanksgiving feast. Conrad and I had walked around the town in the morning looking for an american expat throwing a party while whitney recovered from the bus ride. We did find one american expat who owned the lao lao garden bar, but this was the first year of his 5 years he wasn't throwing a party b/c of the lack of americans travelling this year. So we just went to the night food market and pieced together our thanksgiving dinner. The holiday is really about family, friends, and being thankful, which we had, so it didn't really matter what we had. We avoided the snails, toads, chicken toes, cow intestine, and other uknown things and settled for a vegetable and noodle buffet. 80 cents to fill a plate as high as you could with noodles, vegetables (including potatoes and pumpkin!). We were quite successful with our stacking and managed to stuff ourselves in good thanksgiving fashion. But don't worry America, we didn't let you down and have only vegetables, we stuffed ourselves even further by getting a whole fish and some chicken (hey it's poultry) legs and of course beer laos. We had also found a very good, but extremely overpriced bakery that had pumpkin pie. We bit the bullet in honor of thanksgiving and got a slice of pumpkin, apple, and in honor of SE asia, mango pie. We finished the night with some tiger beers by a fire at the american lao lao garden bar. Not a bad thanksgiving at all! We got kicked out of the bar at 11pm as laos has an 11pm curfew (unless of your you're chinese and own a chinese bar or bowling alley, b/c then, well, your country gives so much money to laos, you can do whatever you please), so grabbed some beer laos roadies and went back to our place to finish the pies.

The next morning we walked the town a bit, had some last baguettes together and then had fruitshakes in the shade by the mekong river. We all got our last beer laos together as I waited for the tuk tuk to take me to the airport. It was a sad sad goodbye as I had so much fun with conrad and whitney. They are so fun, good and adventurous, and great travellers. I always love being with them, and now I know travelling with them is great as well. Thanks Conrad and Whitney!!! It was great. Love ya and miss ya both!

I had hoped to bus to hanoi, vietnam, but apparently there are some decent mountains and crappy roads in between so the route would take 2+ days, which would have been fine if I had the time, but time is running low so I opted for the 40 minutes flight into hanoi and the 2 hour drive in crazy traffic from the airport to the old quarter.