Driving along narrow country roads in late afternoon I see women in sarongs, men in shorts and bare naked kids bathing together at communal wells or on the banks of streams and rivers. Splashing, laughing and enjoying their baths.......
We pass villages where everything is covered in a thick layer of red dust I wonder how people can live that way.......
Our bus stops at a market and nobody tells us how long the stop is and I have to pee so badly that I'm bursting but there are so many exotic things to see that I don't bother to look for the toilet. Suddenly a loud blaring of a horn enters my subconcious and I realize we are being called back.......
Glimpses of hilltribe women who remind me of Geisha , skin like porcelain, turbans and exotic clothing walking ramrod straight along the road.......
Little girls with bright coins hanging from their aprons......
Poverty so profound I feel numb.....
Layer after layer of mountains in shades of blue and green in every direction as far as I can see.....
Crying when I saw the bus we were to take a 13 hour ride on. It was a double decker as big as a village and nearly the entire trip would be through mountains. I was sure we would run over someone ...........
ever since our bus in Nepal had an accident I am extremely picky at what type of bus I get on.....
Rocking and joucing along in my seat so that if I sit forward I feel the same motion as riding a horse and hoping I'm not going to throw my back out. There will be six hours of 100 yards of pavement alternating with 100 yards of gravel and red dust.......
I make room for a woman with an infant who is so full he can barley fit in another suck of milk from his mother's breast as she tries to keep him quiet........
I watch curious people sneak peeks of us while we sneak peeks of them until we are all grinning and nodding........
I eat sticky rice with tamarind stuffed into bamboo and peeled from the top to eat it, a very common travel food here in Laos........
I eat crepes cooked to brown, crunchy perfection on a portable griddle attached to a motorbike. They're filled with chocolate and banana and I think that life couldn't be better than this.......
I wave to children as we speed by. I can't resist their smiles........
I wonder what the heck that food really is..........
Our bus stops in the middle of nowhere and everone gets off for a pee break in the woods........
Our bus stops for a pee break and then has a hard time starting again. The driver and his right hand man disappear into the bowels of the bus with much tinkering and tapping and everyone standing around having opinions on what the problem is, nobody is anxious or frustrated. Eventually there's an OK and off we go. Another hour goes by and same thing happens again. This time a belt is changed and we are on our way again. Oh did I mention that several other buses stopped for a pee break in the same place and to check out what was wrong with our bus. I asked a woman who was practicing her English while we waited would another bus come if we couldn't get going and she said "no this bus"!...................
Rounding a corner and coming within inches of a seated security guard wearing an old fashioned type police hat and a backlava so that only his eyes were visible. I had a shiver........
A Lao woman who owns a guesthouse with her family told me that about 35% of tourists are angry..........
We went to one of the largest markets in Laos today and on the way we came to a pig market. Peolpe were stopping in tuk tuks and buying pigs which were put in sacks. There were lots of kinds of pigs, even striped ones......
We had lunch in the market in a huge dining hall as big as a stadium and full of food vendors.......
I don't know if any of you remember but when we were in Vietnam several years ago at their Tet or New Years, we were told about ancestor worship and burning offerings of cardboard effigies of things for the ancestors in their afterlife. Well we found a market booth selling these and managed a photo. There were three dimensional cardboard houses, stetsons, shirts and ties, jewelry, computers and anything else you might need to make life nice after death.......
We bought a bus ticket the other day which turned out to be one of the open sided trucks and when we went to get in the entire floor space was covered with huge baskets of oranges and almost no space for feet! By contrast, yesterday we took a tourist mini van from point a to point b and it was boring and awful. Give us local transport any day for shorter trips..........
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