For the last couple of days I’ve been taking small side trips out of Luang Prabang. As much as the city is a major tourist destination, it’s easy to get an idea of what real life is like here by going only a short distance away. I hired a small boat pilot to take me across the Mekong to a small village on the other side. The people there were very welcoming. I also made an instant friend. I took some video of kids in the village racing down the road with some bicycle tires. The video may take a minute or two to load, but it’s pretty funny. Watch the girl at the beginning. She had been doing very well until I started filming.
Later in the afternoon, I ate some traditional Lao cuisine and then took a minibus tour to a nearby waterfall. It’s one of the three or four side trips that most people take from here. Nearly everywhere I go I hear “tuk-tuk, waterfall?” Even better than the waterfall was the trip there and back. I hadn’t traveled by land in Laos before this and didn’t know what it would be like. I convinced the driver to stop for this photo of a farm, but not for this photo of the hardest working women in the thatch business.
The sunset was pretty amazing. I’ll have to put up some better photos, but here are a couple.
