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10 hours, 4 taxi rides and 2 buses but yet only 100km traveled was my first experience of a land boarder crossing outside Europe. China and Laos are two of only five communist states left in the world however there seems little coordination between. On reflection we should have perhaps researched the trip some more but we expected the track to be well trodden by westerners although as it turns out we didn’t see any on our three day trip to boarder or the day of our boarder crossing. In China we’d come use to expecting a small town but finding large cities which had 5million plus people so finding civilization never really an issue but Laos only has 6 million people and the north is the least populated so went through town after town which really had no more than one shop and no guest houses. Naively we’d actually expected to change money on the boarder luckily Laos operates a duel currency with dollars

Laos Smiles Delight

Stucros
2006-01-13 18:42:20

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but when trekking you get a very real sense of being at one with it all, when you have the footing to look up that is.
Our trip itinerary we visits and stop offs to various villages where these tribes lived. Again i had some skepticism, however, it is quite obvious that westerns walking through their jungle villages is not an everyday occurrence. Sa ba dee echoed from every house but as our guide informed us these people did not actually consider themselves as Laos. We went to both Camoul and Mon tribe villages on our

beats the northern line any day
trek and these people actually account for near on 40% of the population of Laos. Luckily the guide spoke both dialects.

In the first village I zoomed in for a far a took a picture of this girl starring at us...... she was so intrigued by our presence that she followed us all the way to the next village some 2 hours trekking away (she’s in the picture). Taking videos of them and showing it back just drove them crazy! I would actually say the best thing about doing the trek is meeting the kids.

That night we spent in a village where the tour company had a shared house and it was quite a bizarre experience. News quickly spread around the village of our arrival and from about 6pm to 11pm we had a crowd of about 20 people just looking at us drinking and eating - we almost felt like inviting them inn but they seemed quite happy behind the fence just analysing everything we did???? We were like live TV to them?? One attraction that Laos seems to have plenty of is water falls and we decided that it would be a nice reward/conclusion however the second waterfall (which

we visited after a night of rain) we decided to cheat and get a tuk tuk!!!
Our last morning we decided to feed the monks. We didn’t really find out much of the history of this little ritual but Luang Prabang is full of monks and it seems every morning at 6am they ...