Hello and happy New Year.
We are back in Luang Prabang, beginning our journey back to the capital to finish our time on the bikes. We are now attempting to sell them, so hopefully that won’t take too long and we will hopefully get a good price.
Since the last blog Christmas, New Year and my birthday have all taken place. The boutique hotel aptly named “my dream” was amazing. Slightly too cold for a refreshing swim, but the room was such a treat and much to Craig’s pleasure the breakfast buffet was varied and plentiful!
We basically did nothing but eat and drink for 4 days, our Christmas dinner was lovely, quail with mashed potato and spicy beans, in a setting that will be hard to forget. Overlooking lovely allotments and a river, very special. We were also very lucky to have made so many friends around that time. Christmas Eve was spent with some of them bowling in the “lao bowling and disco” heavy on the bowling (don’t remember doing any disco moves though!)
After that we drove on one of the worst roads yet, its fair to say that we were totally caked in dust for a few days, there wasn’t a drop of tarmac in sight. Although we did find an amazing waterfall which, in order to see the top you had to actually walk up the waterfall, like a stairway made by nature! Will post photos of that. It had clearly at one point been marketed and had an abandoned building and seats etc., but no one had been there for a while, which made it more fun to explore.
We were on our way, slowly to do a boarder run to Thailand so we headed south west from luang prabang. We used some of the Christmas money we had been given to do a half day elephant sanctuary experience. Suffice to say that it was an amazing one. Baby elephants playing with each other, and big moma elephants getting a bath in the lake, was really a great day. The day after we persuaded some locals to hire us our a canoe so that we could explore the same lake. They wanted to hire us a “duck” instead, one of those swan paddle things, not good!!! But would have been highly amusing. After convincing them that we could both swim and not loose the canoe we spent a few hours paddling around the lake, spotted a few birds and generally enjoyed being alone in a huge area of water.
New years we were in a place called Pak Beng, which is the stop off point for travellers on the boat, as it’s the half way point on entering from Thailand and a nice way to see some of lao. The boat arrives at 5pm and leaves again at 9am. As we were off the schedule and on bikes we could enjoy the village more as there were 99% less tourists between the hours of 9 and 5. All the shops shut up, and people relaxed and the village became like any other, as soon as the boats arrive out come all the touts and sellers, it’s a really funny place.
A long and good road to Udomxai for a failed trip to see a 17km long cave. For the past 6 weeks it hasn’t rained a drop. However on the night it rained for 12 hours solid, very heavy rain. So driving in the 4x4 the next morning the road which was not really a road was total mush and clay. For 6 hours we attempted to get up and down small hills was a big fete and spent most of the time out and not inside of the van!
Then we drove to Luang Namtha, which was a little town that I really liked, we ended up spending a whole week there as Craig developed a throat infection, so we had to wait until he had recovered enough before doing a kayaking trip. We chose to do a 2 day trip which went down a rive running next to a protected national park. Unfroatunely because the area is so close to china, the Chinese are buying up a lot of land and planting rubber plantations, so half of the first day was mostly spent looking at rubber trees (not that interesting). But on the second day there was a lot more virgin forest and birds. We had to go down quite a few rapids and thanks to a lack of organisation between me and Craig the (inflatable) double canoe would quite often get filled with water. luckily we never capsized but we did get grounded a few times on some rogue rocks which stuck out of the water. 

there was one ethnic village that we called through in which when the women marry the tradition is to pluck all of the hairs out of the eye brows. very interesting, and the women still looked so exotic and beautiful. i bought some traditionally made paper (had hoped to do a course to learn this procedure but it wasn't available), we also saw a lot of women sewing, a black smiths, and lots of weaving workers. 

after luang namtha it was the BIG drive back along route 13 to try and sell the bikes. we did two very intense and long driving days before selling Craig's bike in luang prabang. we then parted ways for a day as i caught the bus to the capital and craig drove. now reunited we are attempting to sell my more expensive bike in the hope that tomorrow we will be on our way to bangkok!

Bikes sold yesterday and we quickly boarded a night train to Bangkok. More soon. 

bye x