Laos - the land of much templing

Yes, templing is a new word, verb meaning to visit temples. If you go to Laos you might just find that you also need templing in your vocabulary. It seems to be the popular tourist pastime!!

Laos is beautiful! It is the chilled out, calm, slow relaxed version of Cambodia or Vietnam. Only while walking around the tourist centric night markets did we ever here "hello, you buy something" and it was from maybe every 10th stall, not the constant barrage of harassment you get in similar situations in Vietnam or Cambodia.

Some of our highlights -
This temple in southern Laos that is dated at around the 5th century. It was a nice afternoon of wandering around and enjoying the view. We even ran into some other aussies that we met 3 weeks earlier in southern Cambodia!
The view here was stunning - all of Laos had pretty amazing views- unfortunately we couldn't linger too long because our plane from Cambodia was 3 or 4 hours late, and we had a long, long way to drive that afternoon!

The view down to the older temple

Down to the 4000 islands (or, possibly 400 islands seeing as it's wet season and so the river is up). We boated down the mekong and went looking for freshwater dolphins. Weirdly to look for the dolphins you boat to one specific place in the dead centre of the river and wait. Not sure why people seem to expect the dolphins to be only in that one spot..... but they weren't the day we were there!

someone asked the guide what the water wheel was for....
He claimed it was to change the direction of the water and
seemed quite put out when we disagreed and suggested it
is for power generation. Not really sure how it would change the
water direction even if that was the aim.

We spent some time visiting various waterfalls. One included a shrine - which appeared to be a giant tree encased in glass. We never managed to establish why they helicoptered this tree out of the river after it feel over and built a shrine it. I have to assume it was a special tree.

We went into the Danger Zone!

We also found a pretty cool coffee plantation /shop. We didn't have time to do the whole tour, but the guy was very informative informative and when he didn't have enough roasted coffee for us to purchase he showed us how to roast it.

From there we headed up to luang prabang for the real templing to begin. Not to mention some nice shopping in the night markets and sampling some good rice wine. As opposed to sampling Vietnamese rice wine - which can be used as a fuel source, this one was smooth and nice!

Luang Prabang also had this amazing waterfall. It was really a series of waterfalls heading up a hill, which meant we were able to just walk up a little way from the change areas and have a water hole all to ourselves (it was a weekend and this place is obviously very popular with tourists and locals alike). The amazing part is the water, which was crystal clear and a very inviting blue.

I very much enjoyed swimming and sitting in the water. I think I need to spend more time just hanging out in creeks and waterfalls - it always makes me feel perfect and relaxed and grounded.

We couldn't linger too long however as we had a Baci ceremony to get to.


The Baci ceremony was done by ex-monks and nuns. Basically it is a blessing and good luck ceremony. The white strings were tied to our wrists and with each one that was tied on the monk or nun tying it gave a special blessing.

This statue was probably my favorite.
I have no idea why he is lying on what
seems to be the roof of this little house!

We got up extra bright and early and gave alms to the monks. We were told we didn't need any thing special. I specifically asked if we needed a scarf, or if we needed to kneel..... the guide said no and he took us to buy biscuits (which, turned out to be individually wrapped chocolate coated biscuits). When we turned up in the morning with out bag of biscuits the kindly women next door took one look.... then went and got us each a scarf and showed us how to wear it, then they got some cardboard to kneel on.... and gave us their mats! Then they got bowls so that we weren't using plastic bags to hold our offerings. Then as each monk comes past we each put and offering in the bowl. Which made it hard to judge - do I have enough.... do I have too much, should we each give a chocolate to every monk.... or will we run out! Anyway, we were very grateful to the ladies who helped us out!

Vientaine featured plenty more temples. Which we were well done with by this point! but Buddha park does deserve a mention, for being so massive and for being quite creepy. If memory serves there are over 200 statues related in some way to Buddhist stories. Turns out the statues that aren't totally creepy themselves, have creepy back stories.One example being a statue of a man and a woman kneeling down holding out her hands. They looked fairly normal - but turns out he was going around cutting off people's fingers because he thought if he had 1000 fingers he would be immortal, and the woman is his mum whose had that last fingers that he needed.

This little girl and her brother live in a village we
stopped off in. Kari gave her a koala and she immediately
handed it back to her brother. So we gave her another one for
herself. 

I believe this is a frog monster eating the moon