Laos part 1

Hmong Village

Plain of Jars
Bear rehab
waterfall

We have come a long way since chaing mai, Stephen and I have finally made it to Laos. However, we did not make it without experiencing an incredibly horrendous boat ride, fever, and car sickness.
Getting to the border of Laos, not so bad. Getting to Luang Prabang, so bad. In order to get to that magical town we had to take a boat for two days down the Mekong river, which does have the potential to be a beautiful adventure, but given the circumstances, the scenery is the last thing on your mind. Everyone, which is a very large sum of people, is shoved/crammed onto a boat that is no wider than 10 feet, where they are to find a seat on what looks like a church pew made for a smurf, two people to a bench. From there, you sit for the next 8 hours in 98.9 degree temperatures trying to stick your head out into the wind of the boat. And, yes... it was exactly 98.9 degrees, we took the temperature with our compass.
When we finally arrived to our overnight guesthouse, I took care of a delirious fever stricken Stephen. I had never seen him so sick. Needless to say, I didn't go to sleep. I stayed up to make sure he was warm, he had water, he had Tylenol. I really didn't think we were going to get back on the boat the next day, but he sucked it up and we go back on the boat built for smurfs the next morning. We made it through another 8 hours of hell, and when we got off of that boat, we splurged. We got ourselves a room with air conditioning, our own bathroom, and HBO. We stayed in this room for about 3 days, until Steve could be away from the bathroom for more than an hour. Some serious laying around was much needed.
There were a lot of tours to do in Luang Prabang, but we passed. We went to a waterfall to swim and went to a bear rehabilitation center one day, but that was it. We were ready to move on.
From Luang Prabang, we decided to do a 3 day tour, which would take us to see the plain of jars, a Hmong village, and drop us off in vang vieng, which is probably the most popular city in Laos, known for it's caves and river tubing.
When I signed up for this little tour, I did not realize that we would be going around some very swirly mountains. My equilibrium did not like these swirly mountains, I became quite car sick. I felt so sick that I actually told Steve that I would do the 2 day boat ride over again rather than drive through the mountains anymore. I was so happy when we blew a tire... the driving had no choice but to stop. When we got to a little town to fix the tire, I somehow found a pharmacy and motion sickness pills. Alleluia, praise Buddha! I slept/ passed out the rest of the way there, to the town of nothing.
In the town of nothing, there was nothing, and nothing made sense- go figure. After being in a car for about 8 hours, being sick, and not eating all day, we were quite hungry. We walked about a good 2 miles down the main road of the city to only find no where to eat. The "restaurants" that we did find, we were told, they weren't serving food at 5 o'clock in the evening. So... we headed back to our guesthouse to purchase cups o noodles and eat them in bed.
The next morning our driver took us to breakfast, which wasn't much better than the cup o noodles. From there, we went to see 3 different sites of the plain of jars. It's exactly what it sounds like. Giant rock jars dispersed through out the plains. There are different theories of why they are there, how they got there, what they were used for, but my favorite is, they were brought by giants from the mountains.
Ok...I'm going to finish up since, I now am not feeling to well. We finished our tour, we are now in Vang Veing- beautiful. Yesterday, we climbed through a dark cave and went swimming in it. We got monsooned on, a little Lao girl slapped Steve's butt, we watched about 4 hours of "friends" at a bar drinking fruit shakes while it rained. We are of course having a wonderful time.