Travels

The last two week featured visits from Patrick (yey!)

 We hung out in Hanoi for a few days. Spent plenty of time walking around the streets getting accosted by fruit selling women (they have this desire to thrust their fruit baskets at me and insist that photos are taken. I declined this offer.), avoiding scams by bread selling women (I just wanted one sweet bread for each of us... she put about 15 things in a bag and demanded exorbitant amounts of money, when she continued to resist giving only two things I decided I had had enough and walked off..... she then followed and grabbed hold of me twice trying to sell the damn bread) and taking in the insanity that is Hanoi.
These photos were taken on our walk (complete with the necessary ice cream stops) around the lake. Hanoi is actually quite a beautiful city, lots of green space. This lake in the centre of the old town is just one of the garden areas that locals like to come to to relax, exercise and do some ballroom dancing.
The story goes that an emperor was boating on the lake and a magic turtle gave him a sword with which he was able to defeat his enemies. Some time later on another boat trip the turtle returned and snatched back the sword... where it waits at the bottom of the lake.

We also went to see water puppet theatre. This was awesome! I didn't really know what to expect, but the puppets are controlled via underwater rods and levers, with the puppeteers hiding in the water behind a screen. You could only really see the rods if you looked closely, and only because we were sitting above the water a bit. But the arms and heads move around with no visible strings or controllers. It was great. All the scenes also related to water type activities, like rice planting, buffalo swimming, fishing and dragons. The fire breathing / water shooting dragons with segmented bodies that moved through the water were amazing. But I failed to take any photos, partly because I was busy watching and party because the person two rows ahead of us who kept lifting her camera up high to take photos was incredibly annoying - and I didn't want to be that guy!

With our Hanoi Kids guides

I also heard about an organisation called Hanoi Kids. They offer free tours of the city by university students who are wanting to practice their English by regularly talking to native English speakers. The deal is that we as tourists pay for the transport costs and any entry fees. And in return we get a tour, explanations of places that often don't have many English signs and the chance to chat with locals about their lives and experiences (which we all enjoyed so much we ended up spending over an hour drinking one cup of coffee!).



With them we visited the Hanoi Hilton (aka prison originally built by the french to contain and torture Vietnamese revolutionaries, later used to contain captured US pilots). This is a bit of a surreal place with a heavy influence on the mistreatment of Vietnamese by the French and a couple of rooms devoted to showing how well they looked after the American prisoners. I assume that the actual treatment was probably somewhere in between what America says and what Vietnam says.... that's usually the way.

with a statue representative the height of Vietnamese people
at whatever point in time that was (I forgot)

We also visited the temple of literature. It was quite interesting to hear the history of this temple, and the modern uses from the point of view of uni students (who regularly come to pray for luck before exams)

We attempted to visit Ho Chi Minh's tomb.... but neither our hotel reception (when we asked if our clothes were conservative enough), nor the guides actually mentioned that on Friday afternoons it is closed. So we walked around the outside a bit.

The view from our bungalow

Mai Chau was stunning! It took four hours in a van to get there, but definitely worth it! I was a little worried that it would be a bit of a tinsly tourist town (like my experience of visiting that "traditional village" near Buon Ma Thout). It was actually really empty and relaxing, we were even there on a weekend (apparently a lot of locals visit on weekends) but even then it wasn't too busy. The air was clean and the lack of traffic was welcome after a few days in Hanoi! Bike riding and hanging out in the rice fields was fun.
Climbing up to the 1000 steps caves was less fun and more hot, especially as I am told it is in fact 1200 steps! But the satisfaction of beating the steps was worth it... I guess. We also found a mysterious path at the back of the cave which was obviously designed to be explored - it had hand rails.... but then the guide yelled at us to come back and appear to be quite agitated. Maybe there were ghosts back there. I find lots of times that people here do thing I can't explain it all comes down to ghost actions.

Yey, bikes!

 
 Staying in Mai Chau also means you get obligatory after dinner entertainment in the form of "traditional dances".

This is a kind of awkward affair, the first dance featured eight people standing in a line holding hands, then swinging their arms back and forth. A bit like a grade 1 Christmas show dance. But with adults. After this first dance the men dancers all sat down and enjoyed the bucket bong in the corner while the ladies danced. As the grand finale everyone returned for a bamboo dance. Hard to explain without seeing it yourself. but two people hold two pieces of bamboo on the ground and hit them down twice, then smash them together. Meanwhile dancers jump in and put pf the bamboo, avoid getting their ankles smashed. Everyone was brought up to join in the dance. Which got more and more hilarious as we discovered how bad at timing the group of Vietnamese girls on the tour were..... especially when they wanted to hold the bamboo and do that bit! a couple of people got bruised ankles in that portion of the dancing!

Halong bay

Next stop, Halong bay!
Boating around, drinking expensive cocktails (I have been in Vietnam too long and every seems expensive now. These were $4-6 cocktails.... I will not cope with Australia prices) and relaxing on the beach. Pretty awesome!

Halong bay is made up of limestone cliff islands. The landscape is pretty stunning and once you get out and away from the ridiculous amounts of diesel smoke it is amazing. As a bonus, because it is limestone cliffs it has lots of caves, like this one. I have found that Vietnam in general has a bit of an obsession with caves, and they have many caves. This one featured bonus lights-of-every-colour and rocks that looked vaguely like stuff if you squinted really hard and pretended!

Fishing boats in a sheltered bay

We also kayaked around some of the cliffs and through caves.

Swimming wasn't totally the nicest, because even moored in the "clean water swimming spot" there were patches of oil in the water. I really hope that boat owners (at least the tourist boats) see that people are not into the smokey polluting boats and they need to do some vaguely regular maintenance to actually keep the bay nice!

But swimming did involve water entry from the very top of the boat. So I was into the jumping-off-the-sun-deck thing :)

I had heard from various people that Halong Bay was disappointing, or dirty and polluted. I found it beautiful! Yes, there was pollution from all the boats, but some places seem to be striving to reduce that. Our hotel on Monkey island was collecting all the flotsam that came near the beach and burning it. I am sure it's probably as much about keeping their private beach nice as it i about reducing pollution. But they didn't wait for the tide to wash stuff away.

Hopefully everyone (tourists and locals alike) will try to keep it nice. but we had a great time!

That's pretty much our first week wrapped up. Will add more about the second week later!

sunset drinks on the balcony. life is good

Last projects

One of my last projects for the red cross orphanage, building security gates.

Kids playing in the gated room

To put this into context I need to explain a bit about the orphanage system. So the red cross has 24 kids. 4 of these kids have cerebral palsy and are unable to sit up, or participate in self care activities like feeding themselves.
4 of the other kids also have disabilities, but are mobile and able to get around the orphanage. This means that they can get into all sorts of mischief!
3 of the other kids are around 3 or 4, so they are also quite mischievous and really want to have lots of attention, plus all the older mobile kids can easily steal toys or treats from the younger kids.
The rest of the kids are under 1. Only two of the kids are toilet trained, so the rest need to wear nappies. To look after all these kids are 3 to 4 carers. They work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with 3 or 4 days off a month.

Slightly more controlled madness 

Because they are so overworked, and a lot of the kids are able to climb out of the cots, they tie the kids into the cots with a rope made of handkerchiefs tied together. When we arrive in the morning at around 8am we untie the kids and because we have the extra supervision can let them run around and play. I believe they get re tied up at lunch time when we leave.

When asked why they have to be tied in I am told it is to stop kids getting into the bathroom and burning themselves with the hot water, or getting into the kitchen and hurting themselves. I am sure a big part is also around them making messes in the storage areas that the carers really don't have time to clean up. Some of their reasoning about safety doesn't really make much sense though, frequently the carers don't shut the door to the bathroom which would work just as well to prevent burns, or shut the gate out onto the road!

I negotiated with the carers around trying to stop the tying up of kids. As well as stopping them from being allowed or able to play with each other, or socialize, it also is often tied very tightly and looks painful, and can cause rashes and skin infections. So I decided to pay to get gates put on the main room and so as long as the carers shut the gate, and shut the bathroom doors than the kids should be safe and able to be free!
The gates are a lot higher than normal baby safety gates, but these kids are really good climbers!!


So the first day that we arrived once the gates were completed the kids had all been taken out of cots when they woke up (which I'm guessing is pretty early) and were playing and running around freely!

Talking to the carers they said they really like the gates, and it is a lot easier as they can now move freely between the kitchen and store rooms without having to watch the kids as much.
Definitely a success!!

Ngan

Lovely little Ngân is doing amazingly! For those who don't recall she is a 9 yeast old with cerebral palsy that we see at our drop in clinic.
If you want to see her original post it is in January
Just before I went away to Cambodia Sandie and i put our heads together to find a walker that Ngân would be able to use independently. A local handgun was able to come up with this. Ngân loved it immediately. Last week I asked to see her at home so that I could check up on how she is going in the walker. Mostly wanting to make sure that nothing is going wrong or possibly causing issues. The walker is a bit bulky to bring into the clinic!

 Ngân is going great guns in her walker. Great guns being as well as can be expected, considering her crouch gait, and with extreme joy and enthusiasm! She is tending to sit on the seat and peddle with her legs rather than standing, but with no achilles tendons building the strength to stand with straight knees is near impossible - yet alone on one leg to step! We did try a few different set ups to see if we could get her supporting her own weight more, but nothing really worked. We discussed focusing more on standing upright.


The absolutely best thing about the walker, the bit that made me so happy and where I feel the biggest benefit is........
In the afternoons, when it is cool, Ngân goes walking in the street with all the other neighborhood children! How freaking amazing is that. In the past she would have been lying inn her lounge room, maybe out on the porch. But walking around the streets with the other kids. Beautiful.

I think sometimes dad helps out, but I was told that if he is busy the other kids with help out, if she gets stuck on something (it's a bulky frame) or if a car comes and they need to move quick. Mum was worried that she is spending too much time and asked me if there is a maximum amount of walking time she should be doing... apparently it is often hours every day!
I just honestly can't get over the quality of life boost for this girl!


Of course, the hospitality involved in this home visit was overwhelmingly beautiful. As soon as we arrived mum delivered tea and I could hear her saying bun beo and "an" which i recognized as a type of food and eat.
I insisted that I had indeed eaten lunch, and didn't need any bun beo. The eat topic didn't get dropped...... I could hear the conversation going on behind my back. Some understanding seemed to be reached, i assumed that we would be presented some biscuits or fruit..... something snacky that we could nibble on. Refusing food is a bit rude, so I figured I could handle nibbling. Nothing appeared and to be honest I completely forgot about the eating issue....... until we tried to leave. At this pointy mum looked shocked, and betrayed. She said something that i assume basically translated to "but, but, but, bun beo?"
More negotiations happened...... I assume Mr Phuc was explaining that we have other people to visit. Then everyone looked at me and grinned.
Apparently it was decided that i would return for dinner! That Vietnamese hospitality!!!


So after visiting a couple other families we headed back to Ngân's place. More negotiations occurred..... I believe at this point out was Mr Phuc having to explain why exactly huge wasn't starting for dinner!
Ngân was pretty gosh darn excited to have her dinner guest! As a bonus for me i got to see how well she is able to feed herself. Even using chop sticks most of the time!
Bun beo turns out to be the Hue specialty dish. It was delicious, but not exactly a dish for western tastes...... as far  as I can establish (understanding that mum has the best English there.... and it is minimal!) Bun beo is wet rice paper, covered in a paste made of fish sauce and I'm not really sure what else, which is then liberally sprinkled with powdered shrimp and then you pour fish sauce, or fish sauce mixed with chili on it. So, I really liked it. But man, it's a lot off shrimp/fish sauce!
I did start slowing down on the bun beo rather quickly..... at which point I was getting teased by Ngân for eating too slowly! But it's ok, I have enough Vietnamese to tease Ngan back for being a piggy later when she ate her dragon fruit with no hands.

All in all a great evening of family time :-)

Where are they now.... red cross kids

So, this one is mostly for past volunteers who want to know what the kids are up to.

Ha and Thanh

feeding time

As you can see both these girls are feeding themselves now (remember back in January when getting Ha to hold the spoon would be a battle Sally, Now she won't let you take the spoon off her when she is done!). Thanh is still a bit messy, but practice makes perfect I say! I am also an advocate for shirtless lunch times. That way even if I wasn't here to supervise..... the carers might see, and follow suit, and have one less reason (cleaning them, washing more clothes) not to let the girls feed themselves. At least we can keep practicing everyday I am here!

Ha playing with other kids

Thanh is also walking all by herself. She will grab at anything possible to hold on to, but she will walk across the room alone as well! Such an improvement! She does still throw toys - a lot..... but she will also play with toys (particularly if someone sits with her to show her how!)

Ha's play skills are improving too. She enjoys playing with other kids now, often riding on the cars with them. Even more of an improvement though, she will play on her own and be quite happy. Bouncing on the "roger" horse things, riding around on the cars or sometimes pretend play feeding dolls. From the girl who would just follow you around with a sock asking you to put it on her, then taking it off and repeating the cycle, or wandering off out the gate if no one plays the sock game with her - it's a pretty big deal!


Nga

practicing drawing

Nga is a totally different little girl to the kid I met in January. Well, mostly different (we have occasional lapses into I'm-going-to-explore-this-medicine-cabinet moods if she feels ignored).

Nga loves to interact and does so much more productive play now! I try to give her jobs to keep her part of whatever we are doing (putting the dirty clothes into the washing basket when changing other kids nappies, I know Phuc has been getting her to help him while he does physio with other kids too). She does demand high 5's and much praise for each baby shirt safely delivered into the washing basket....... But that seems a small price to pay for happiness!

Nga giving herself at thumbs up after finishing
another puzzle

Nga quite enjoys drawing so today we worked on doing purposeful lines (up and down, sideways, circles, x's all those pre-prep groups watching OTs is paying off) instead of giant scribbles. When she gets it and gets a high 5 her whole faces lights up with pride and joy, it is amazing to watch!

Puzzles are still her favorite activity, and I am working on sign language while doing these. She seems to understand that different signs have different meanings, and get her what she wants! Teaching her more, and teaching the carers is the next step. The puzzles are getting more and more complex, from simple peg puzzles, which she needed lots of guidance to find the right hole and turn the pieces to make them fit, a few months ago to picture puzzles today - which she did amazingly at!

Deep in puzzle concentration

I am trying to think of a way to allow her access to the puzzles and building blocks, which stops that other kids being able to get into them. The difficulty is that most other kids are so young that they just want to pick up whatever toy someone else is playing with, walk around with it for a while, scream if you try to return the puzzle piece to the puzzle..... then drop it somewhere never to be seen again.

I am not totally sure how much she would enjoy the puzzles or blocks without the constant attention.... but as she gets more settled I am trying to lessen the high 5's for every single piece put in place - just for finishing the whole puzzle, or building the tower so high it falls down. Hopefully I can wean her off a little of that praise! Get her enjoying the game itself! But any suggestions of how a very tricky 9 year old can get into the toys..... but a collection of 3 year old can't, would be appreciated. I am thinking of going with height, but these kids are pretty good at playing stack-em-ups


I have ranted for quite a lot about Nga here....but to be honest I would say she is the child at red cross who has made the most changes. And who has gone from having basically nothing expected of her, to learning skills and problem solving. I am really happy with all the changes :)

Tam lifting her arms 

Tam is looking well. Her chest is mostly clear at the moment, and her cradle cap (or whatever it is that was happening on her head!) is almost all gone. These two health concerns clearing up have to make life a bit nicer for her! She adores the ramp and being taken for a walk outside in her chair. Bumps and lumps to go over have her laughing hysterically!

Tu and I work on a lot of standing when he is feeling up to it (he lets me know if he isn't!). He has such tiny little bird bones, I figure some weight bearing has to be a good thing for him!

helping to pack away toys

Thao (aka Spidie) and Phuc work on lots of standing and trying to take steps. She is still convinced that her craby crawl is the best way to get around. And she certainly does get around mighty fast! Hopefully seeing Thanh walking more and more will help motivate her a little.



The three (very cheeky) amigos are getting into just as much mischief as ever, but I don't expect (or want - I love their spunk) them to change any time soon! They really are only as crazy as I would expect any group of toddlers to be. Especially ones with minimal supervision!

"helping" to clean something up
(I'm not really sure anything needed mopping anyway :P)

I am trying to motivate them to do some drawing. They are always very excited to come and start, actually putting pencil to paper, or sticking with it for more than a minutes is no so successful. I have so far had no success in trying to teach one that the point of pencils isn't to bite off the end - then hold it out asking for a new one because yours wont write..... But with time, maybe they will come to enjoy colouring, or scribbling.

Trying his hardest to steal my camera! 

summaries of a new disability centre, and moving on

Our last two weeks in Phnom Penh have been spent at the Veterans International Centre (VIC) where people with disabilities can come to get wheelchairs/prosthetics/physiotherapy/etc.
We moved to here because with our lack of nursing skills, Nancye and I found that we aren't super helpful in a nursing clinic. And not so many people with disabilities were coming to the clinic as we expected.

The VIC was much more fitting with our experiences and busy!

There are a couple of dorms where people from out of town can come and stay. It seems people stay for around 3 weeks, then head home for a couple of weeks "holiday" and if need be come back.

The centre is pretty varied. They seem to see a lot of kids with torticollis or club foot. Lots of Spinal cord injuries (one from a bike accident, one who fell off a house and one who got shot in the spine by police while walking home from university, past a protest). Quite a lot of prosthetic leg making, some from mines, some from bike accidents, plus remaking them as people need new ones.

So we got shown around and introduced to everyone, then shown to a person. The physios here all talk at least reasonable English. But the difficulty is that they are all always busy with their own patients and not really able to translate for more then 30 seconds at a time. So there was a lot of smiling, and pointing at myself saying Lucy, pointing at the child and trying to guess how to pronounce their name. Luckily for us the notes are written in English and a lot of the people we saw had been seen by a previous volunteer from America.

The interesting thing to see it that the physio's seem to have very very specific areas of speciality. Like, rather than specialising in paediatrics - specialising in clubfoot only. So there seem to be a lot of gaps for people who don't fit into one of those categories.

some of our highlights:

Organising Heung to have a splint for eating made. Heung had a traffic accident and now has incomplete spinal cord injury making him a quadriplegic. Before we got this he was using both hands to try to hold a built up fork and scoop at rice. We didn't actually see any go into his mouth so in practice I don't think he ever actually tried to feed himself - just had family do it for him. with the splint he can get the spoon in his mouth with one arm (sometimes using the other for support). He had a really beautiful smile on his face once he got the splint working (it probably wasn't until then that he actually worked out what the heck we were all doing! We weren't able to remove the spoon from this. So we made a second one that he can use while he practices writing, using his phone etc.

Seeing a little girl come back two days after her initial appointment....
 Initially we were told that she has CP. But when we did the initial assessment it didn't seem like she actually has any diagnosis. At 1 year old she isn't standing or walking and her parents are getting worried. she can sit perfectly well (great posture actually) when placed in sitting. But refuses to stand. My diagnosis...... not tummy time. This kid started screaming when she was put on her tummy, even when she laid on Mums chest. Every time she cried or screamed she got picked up again. We tried to explain that she is crying because it is new, and hard and she isn't actually getting hurt (so leave her there!) but we weren't really sure how much got translated, or whether the parents would let her cry. Two days later she comes back. We actually didn't recognise her because when we looked over she was lying on he tummy playing happily. Amazing! Unfortunately most of the young kids were scared of us weird white people and would cry if we picked them up, touched them or sometimes - looked at them too long! This little girl was definitely in that category! So we had to use a teddy bear to demonstrate to mum how to help her roll over, or sit up by herself. Mum did really well, but it is so much harder without being allowed to touch the child. And without being able to speak the language!
It was a pity that we only saw her for the first time at the very end of our trip. I think if we had been able to see her more than twice she would have gotten use to us (we kind of got a smile out of her towards the end!) and we would have had her crawling! She picked up new skills so fast once she got tummy time!

The even more rewarding part of that session and trying to explain to the physio translator how very very important being on tummy is for babies came later that day. We weren't really sure if the physio understood what we were trying to explain about the importance, but then later thast day I looked over and saw him with a little baby on it's tummy. He was looking at how well it could hold it's head up, and even using a rattle to entice it to look. That was great! Hopefully they will continue to fight the tummy time fight. I think culturally here kids don't spend enough time just being on the floor, rolling around or whatever. Every time I go past a house and notice babies they are carried, or in a hammock.

Laos - the North

Firstly - apologies for the delays in updates. This is partly due to meeting up with more friends and embarking on a tour of Laos - with an extremely full itinerary! and party because my laptop has finally decided that bits regularly breaking off it isn't enough and it refuses to turn on.
So the next few collections of stories and photos may appear out of order - or with much delays!

From Luang Prabang we drove up the most impressive range road I have ever been on.
It was like the gillies range on steroids.... then some.
300km of winding up a mountain, then down the other side, then up another mountain and down the other side. I am actually not really sure if at the end of all it we were at the top, or at the bottom. It was a long long 9 hours in a winding van. For the two people in our party who get travel sick this was a particularly hellish trip! But the scenery was stunning!

We were rewarded when we finally arrived in Phonosovan. Land of the Jars. well, Plain of jars. Basically it is full of giant stone jars and unexploded bombs.

 

The Jars are of mysterious and not entirely understood origin. They are carved out of rock and clumped together in sites. Best guess seems to be that they were used to put human remains in, then when the person had completely decomposed the remains were removed and buried nearby. Or possible people were cremated inside, then buried afterwards.

This red sign apparently says - don't go past here. Bombs.
You do just keep getting reminded here!

Locally there are many stories - we heard that after a great battle the victorious army used them to make "Lao Lao" or rice whiskey. Which would have been a lot of effort for some lao lao - these things are
massive! and carved out of solid rock!
We also heard that a giant built them.... but I am not quite clear why the giant man wanted to build them.

Some talk was of a fertility ceremony, complete with claims of people being locked inside until they made a baby (Actually, I can't really remember if we were told about people getting locked inside - or we made that part up)

It was pretty amazing to see the field full of jars. Some of them 2 metres tall, most around 1 or 1.5. Plus the sun came out for us (an improvement on when we arrived the day before in pouring rain and everyone told us the weather would be the same today!). The view around fields and farm was stunning. Bright blue sky, lush green grass, deep red fertile looking soil.
But looking into the farm land did bring back the truth of the area..... bombies.

The night before we spent some time at the Mine Advisory Group (MAG) museum. It was shocking to get the full picture of how ravaged by bombs Laos is. Especially considering that they never engaged in war, and America technically "wasn't dropping bombs". More horrifying is the nature of cluster bombs - which are designed to kill and maim people - not to destroy military building or weapons. Add the fact that about 30% didn't explode on impact (usually on impact with villages and farms that may have been along the route of the Ho Chi Minh trail - or that the Army decided to destroy so that communists couldn't use them for food or supplies. Not that there was any suggestion these villages were providing them with food).

Anyway, about 30% of the 2 million+ tons of bombs didn't explode. Instead they are in farms, or school yards, or stuck halfway up a clump of bamboo just waiting for someone to shake the tree. People are constantly afraid of farming their own land, afraid of their kids playing or even going to school. Whole villages are unable to have a stable source of food because clearing new farm land, or new space for houses is terrifying! In one village the locals were able to identify over 100 bombs that they knew the location of from memory, and this is not the first clearing mission in that village.

The most shocking, disgusting part of this all.... assuming that you have got past the fact that 30 years on children die when they pick up a bright yellow, tennis ball sized object.... is that humans are still using cluster bombs.

MAG marker - basically stay on the white side
because the grey side might blow you up!

I don't really know how normal, regular people can help stop this. But we absolutely need to. War is a terrible horrible thing... but leaving millions of tiny bombs strewn around civilian land forcing people to live in fear, and risk their life just to provide their kids with barely enough to eat is unacceptable and we normal people need to find a way to stop it, because it is obvious that the people with bombs won't stop on their own.

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