Letter to family from Laos with love

Hello families!

We’ve had a marvelous first day exploring Luang Prabang. Our plans for our first day — to follow the guide book walking tour (i.e. see many temples and other local sites) and visit the Royal Palace Museum — did not pan out BUT that is a good thing! We got side tracked by amazing Lao people who showed us around their city and took us to places only the locals frequent and found many nooks and crannies that amazed us and showed us just how different Lao is from Thailand.

Now we have a few moments before we meet our Canadian friends (who we met on the Mekong two-day cruise) for dinner at Restaurant Brasserie L’Elephant, apparently some of the best and cheapest French food we will be able to sample outside of France (Lao was a French colony up until the 1950s). Sorry to make you drool, Barry!

Although many of the French influences, like a love of baguettes and French pastries and the colonial architecture preserved in Luang Prabang, have made our stay in Lao so different from Thailand, it is also the people here that are making it a joyful experience.

Our Lao friend, Somphet (”sum peht”) connected us with a Lao SIM card so we now have a Lao phone number. How cool is that? I am sure some of you will find it equally cool to say you have called Lao, so if you would like to call us on our mobile the number is ###-####. The country code for Lao is 856. We don’t seem to have an area code or other digits before the phone number so we are not sure if there is anything else you might need to dial.

Tomorrow we may or may not sleep in as we moved guesthouses today from a somewhat rundown cramped spot that cost $7/night to a $10/day spot we think is a steal. This is the honeymoon suite I would have wanted if we had taken a “normal” honeymoon (not complaining, just saying). The all reddish wood building, beautifully made bed, fan-cooled room and high ceilings fit the image in my mind of what a grand teak wood Asian mansion would look like. Our photos, to be posted at a later date, will have to show you what we mean if you can’t imagine the same.

After a restful Saturday morning tomorrow, perhaps a toasted baguette or pastry for breakfast, and a Lao coffee for me (yes, i am drinking coffee here – it is made with condensed milk, has a scent similar to espresso, but tastes like the best mochaccino you could imagine), we may head to one of the waterfalls in the area to swim in one of the pools at each of the seven levels of falls. In the evening we may meet up with Somphet for dinner, he recommends BBQ, since Lao people like BBQ as much as Thai, Malaysian, Taiwan, and all of us in North America. We will be trying to persuade our Canadian friends to join us. A call in the early morning or late evening for us should work out just fine on Saturday.

On Sunday and Monday we have signed up for a two-day trek of sorts. I say of sorts because we will be living and working with elephants and mahouts, the people who train and drive elephants, at an elephant park, hiking to a nearby village and then returning to Luang Prabang by two-person kayak. As a result of this grueling schedule, and the fact that we will need both hands to wash the elephants in the river, we may not be able to answer our phones until we get back on Monday afternoon.

So give us a call when it is convenient for you, and if there is no answer please know that we are learning about and hopefully continuing to love a landlocked land that is more than just the most bombed country in history.

lots of love
rIAm and jft