We arrived in the UNESCO World Heritage Town of Luang Prabang a little after lunch time on Friday 6 July. After battling our way up the causeway through the horde of taxi drivers and people hawking hotels, we reached the town and began looking around for a place to stay. After about an hour we settled on a place on the edge of the hustle-and-bustle, just off the main strip. It was soooo hot and soooo humid that we were sweating buckets by the time we checked in. We grabbed a quick shower and then went out to explore. We visited the nightly market and saw all the amazing hand-made crafts and art - very cool. We found the local food lane and grabbed a cheap buffet dinner, where we met a cool guy from Bulgaria who invited us to stay with him when we're in Europe. We walked back slowly to out room, picking up a delicious mango & Nutella crepe on the way :-)

Saturday we decided to move to a different hostel accross the road and then went back into town to look around. We had lunch and a lemon-mint fruit shake at one of the baguette stalls, before continuing further. It was so hot and humid that soon we decided to head back to our room for some afternoon relaxing. That evening we set out to climb the hill with the big temple at the top to watch the sunset, but it was overcast so we just wandered along the river instead. By chance we found a bunch of guys playing Boulle and sat and watched for a while. They had a proper marked off 'court' with floodlights and everything - clearly they play quite a lot as they are incredibly accurate.

A bit further on, we found a traditional Laos restaurant under a huge tree overlooking the river, where we had dinner. They had these individual BBQ pits which were placed on your table, and then they give you something that can most closely be compared to a cake pan with a dome (that makes a ring cake with a hole in the centre) that is placed over the coals. The dome has got holes (like a coliander) and you place the meat on there to cook, and the veggies and noodles in water you place in the base. Everything cooks itself and you pick and chose what you want to eat in each bowl. Lime, garlic, chilli and sundried tomatoes were also provided... such a lovely way to spend an evening. Afterwards we wandered back to the main part of town, bought a couple things from the market before heading home.

Sunday we planned to go to the nearby waterfalls for the day. We packed our swimming things, bought baguettes from our usual guy for our picnic lunch and were all ready to go, when it started to rain :-( So we cancelled our trip and ate our lunch back at our accomodation. We went back into town to talk to some travel agents before Monique went off to read to some local kids at the library while Kevin went back to the room to do some admin. That afternoon we had a nap and then walked around town where we found a cool little street stall to have dinner at - yummy noodle soup. We then went to the popular coffee shop called Joma where we enjoyed some really good Laos coffee while we applied for our Vietnamese visa and booked a flight to Hanoi. We left when they closed and went straight to bed.

Monday we were up super early (05:15) to watch the monks collecting their daily alms - where the local people give them food in exchange for some sort of "good-deeds points". This is apparently quite a serious deal around here, so we had read up before-hand on how to respectfully watch. Unfortunately, we seemed to be in the minority :-/ There were just all these tourists running around getting all up in the monks' faces with their big cameras and flashes - we actually felt quite embarrased being there. Apparently a lot of the monasteries want to stop doing these public collections because of the tourists. Afterwards, we went back to our room to relax for a while. It was a much sunnier day than before so we decided to try for the waterfalls again. We packed our things, grabbed some baguettes from our guy and hopped on a shuttle truck. The waterfalls are very cool - like nothing we'd seen before, so a bit difficult to describe. The water is a deep turqoise colour and flows between all these different pools shaded by ferns and big trees. The water wasn't too warm, but bearable to swim in. We had a great afternoon relaxing and swimming. It seems we left just in time as it started to pour with rain on the way back. We got quite wet, but the thing with these tropical storms is that it's still really warm, so even though you're wet, you're not cold or uncomfortable. We had a shower back at our room when we got back to town and then had another cheap dinner at our noodle soup place on the street-corner. We looked around the night market one last time before heading back to bed.

Tuesday we checked out of our guesthouse, bought some more baguettes for lunch and went back to our guest house and waited for our shuttle. We were picked up by tuk-tuk and taken to the bus station. We were directed to the right shuttle and waited around for a few more passengers before loading our bags and heading off for some down time in the super-chilled town of Muang Ngoi.