Laos was lovely. I recommend that you take a trip there sometime. The weather was nice. The food was amazing. Laos is a former French colony, and Luang Prabang is a quaint mix of French and Lao food and architecture. Luang Prabang was a very easy city to visit. It is a little like Banff: nice restaurants, quaint shops, small town. The whole town is easily walkable. The traffic is very quiet, and most people get around on bicycles. There is a very nice night market in Luang Prabang.
From Luang Prabang we went to Vang Vieng. In your someday trip to Laos I recommend that you skip Vang Vieng. This is the city that people head to if they want to do drugs in Laos. A lot of the tourists here looked to be in pretty bad shape. We did not stay long.
The next place we stopped was Vientiane - the capital city. I really like Vientiane. It was easy to get around as a tourist, but it was still a very Asian city. There was a lot of traditional clothing and activities. This city is not just set up as a tourist town, but it happily welcomes tourists to come to visit. Vientiane has a replica Arc de Triumph rising up unexpectedly in the middle of a major street not far from the traditional morning market and noodle stalls.
We took a sleeper bus from Vientaine to Pakse in the south. This bus was amazing! We got a fairly comfortable bed to share. They provided dinner, bottled water, candies, and face wipes to freshen up in the morning. Even with a very nice bus it is hard to get a decent night's sleep in a moving bus. When we arrived in Pakse we had a look around and decided that there was not much of interest here and we carried on to our final destination: Don Khon. The trip included a short trip on the side car of a motorbike. David took some pictures of us going down the street on this contraption. I made him stop taking pictures when I noticed how distracted the driver was becoming. We have a nice picture that we will have to post sometime where the only person with a nice posed smile is the driver. He is totally not looking at the road. We arrived at the bus stop to find that it is not, in fact, a bus that goes to the four thousand islands bus a songtao. Three hours in a songtao is not overly comfortable, especially not after spending the whole night on a bus. After this there was a short ride in a longboat before we would arrive on Don Khon and at a guesthouse with what seemed like the most comfortable bed in the world. We really enjoyed Don Khon. There is nothing to do there. There are no tourist sights that you feel obliged to rush around and see. The only thing to do is relax. We went for walks and bike rides and sat around reading our books. I finally finished reading Homer's Iliad. It is a very boring book. I don't even like war stories, so I really don't know why I decided to read it.
We did a bus riding marathon to get from Don Khon to Ko Samui in southern Thailand where we met with Debbi and Dave (and Otis) for their Chinese New Year holiday. The overnight bus on this trip was not at all like the other. The seats were so close together that our knees pressed into the back of the seats in front of us. Everyone had to recline at the same time. It was a very uncomfortable ride. Ko Samui has been very nice. The weather is hot and the ocean is a shade of turquoise that I thought only existed on postcards. I have never before been to the ocean in a place where it is actually warm enough to get into. The push and pull is very strange.
We are wrapping up our time here in Ko Sumui relaxed and sunburned. Apparently some people can burn through the shade of a beach umbrella and three applications of SPF 60 sunblock. Ow. It has been really nice to spend time with friends. We have not had the chance to spend time with friends (except on Skype) for quite a while. Tomorrow we plan to head for Bangkok where we will spend a few days before we head for Cambodia.
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