Luang Prabang Children
Hotel breakfasts in Vietnam usually consist of square sliced white bread with an unpleasant odd sweet taste, and a cold fried egg. Despite Pak Beng being in the middle of nowhere this morning we were given freshly baked baguettes with unsalted butter and jam. Hopefully a taste of things to come and a sign that being brutally occupied by the French for a few years may not be all bad.
Spent another 7 hours on the slow boat up the Mekong. Not long after leaving we pulled over to visit a Hmong village which seemed better organized than yesterdays.
Another stop at a Buddha cave but I stayed down with the boat to chat to an incredibly drunk group of 40 Thai tourists, one of whom was lugging about a full size karaoke machine. The rest were lugging about full sized bottles of vodka at 10 in the morning.
Eventually we made it to Luang Prabang where I accidentally insulted a room full of Americans over dinner. Silence ensued punctuated only by unhelpful giggling from the girls.
A quick wander round town revealed a huge but not very varied night Market and was drawn in by the lure of a French cheese baguette. Despite the expectation of Brie or Rochefort, it turned out to be the rather less impressive, but much easier to store La Vache qui Rit, or Laughing Cow, ‘cheese’ so not really up to scratch.
Past the night Market we came upon a street of decent bars and ran into a colleague of one of the girls who was trailing about with another girl who she’d met on the bus. This was the first time in a week I’d discovered a wi-fi signal so undoubtedly appeared rather rude as I pored over a huge batch of emails.
