Luang Prabang

Happy Halloween! We arrived in Luang Prabang on the evening of Halloween. Upon Alisa's insistence to incorporate balloons into a costume, we began a desperate, last minute search for the must-have costume component. We were hoping for green and purple balloons so we could be grapes, but we only found red and blue - a little accidental patriotism and a bit of a confusing costume, but people were amused all the same.

Leaving the disco with our new Laos friends and Rich, a friend from the Isle of Man (ten points if you've ever heard of this place). Young Laos people take the disco very seriously. They even do synchronized dancing that they've learned from how-to-dance videos.

The next day our friends took us to a waterfall and on our way home we were invited to a village party. They were celebrating their victory in a women's kayak race and we have never seen such ecstatic winners. Karaoke, dancing, and booze a plenty. This man was one of the evening's all-star dancers.

Alisa letting a bird go free at a temple on the top of the Phousi Mountain in Luang Prabang.

We crossed the Mekong River to take a walk through the villages. We gave the kids the balloons left over from our Halloween costumes.


Novice monks collecting their morning alms.

Laos has really beautiful waterfalls.

Elephant Crossing!

The world already feels like a different place

We woke up at 6am to watch the election returns with other Americans at an American-owned bar. Cheers, tears, champagne - we just wish we could have been in the United States to experience this momentous event with all of you.

The owner of the bar later that night.

Still celebrating late into the night. Yay, Obama.

Since bars in Luang Prabang close at 11:30pm, we spent the rest of the evening jumping for joy in our hotel room (notice the cool wall art) and taking photos of ourselves.

5 days later and we are still devoting every drink to Obama. We really do feel like we can be less ashamed of being Americans. In nearly 10 months of travel we have not met a single person, be it Thai villager, Indian rickshaw driver, or fellow traveler who was not rooting for Obama. Here's to continued American hope and mobilization toward change!

Laos: Untitled.

In eastern Laos we visited the mysterious Plain of Jars where there are fields and fields full of huge . . . jars. Why are they there? No one knows . . .

This area is also one of the most heavily bombed areas in the world. To see the jars, we had to walk along specific paths that had been cleared of unexploded ordnance. The unexploded bombs are left over from continuous US bombing between 1964 and 1973. Apparently the US dropped an average of one bomb every 8 minutes during these years. This is half a metric ton of bombs for every person living in the country at the time.

Laos people continue to be killed and injured by the bombs every year. In an already impoverished area that survives off of farming, the people's livelihoods are seriously inhibited by the bombs that lie hidden in much of the farmland.

In the local villages, military shrapnel is used for fencing, housing material, and flower beds. The villagers also sell the shrapnel and it is converted into all kinds of things such as forks and spoons. Recently, an increasing number of people are dying in the process of trying to salvage shrapnel to sell. To give you a sense of how little they make off the shrapnel, one side of a cluster bomb (what you see forming the fence) earns US $15. This is a lot of money for subsistence farmers.

Our tour guide, whose two cousins were killed by an unexploded bomb just last year, invited us into his home and shared with us some traditional Laos whiskey - poured out of his grandfather's military canteen. One side of our tour guide's family worked for the CIA during the war and the other side worked for Pathet Lao, the communist resistance group that eventually succeeded in gaining control of their country.

We were lucky enough to arrive in Vientiane during a big festival. The area surrounding the national monument was jam-packed with carnival rides, souvenir shops, food stalls, and lots of stages with singing and dancing performers. This wonderfully inventive man was selling special pancakes for kids. He first used colored pancake batter to draw cartoon characters in the pancake. Then he would write the kids' names in sweet chili sauce, add fried fish sticks, and lots of sweetened condensed milk. We know this combination of sweet, savory, and seafood sounds too good to be true, but the kids loved it. And so did we. So much we nearly vomited.

We visited "Buddha Park" outside of Vientiane. Basically a park full of all kinds of beautiful and strange statues of the Buddha and an assortment of various other gods and creatures. Here two novice monks are posing inside a statue. The park was full of novice monks looking for fun on a Sunday afternoon. This was a photo they were taking of themselves and we just asked if we could take a snap, too.

Novice monks trying to take a photo of us on their cell phone. Even monks have camera phones.

Come On, Drink for the Children

By posting this, we have automatically offset 350 pounds of carbon!

And this isn't the only thing we've been doing to make the world a better place . . .

We have now made it to Laos. The mountains are really beautiful and the children are refreshingly unjaded. We are staying in a city called Vang Vieng that sits next to the Namsong river. We spent a few days helping out at an organic farm. You would be surprised to know that what they really needed help with was selling mojitos! Of course, we happily rose to the challenge. It seems that the city's main attraction is a wild inner-tubing drink-a-thon designed especially for foreigners (imagine rope swings, zip lines, mud pits, slides, and free shots). The organic farm is situation at the inner-tubing starting point so they wisely set up a bar to raise money for their local education projects. They specialize in organic mulberry mojitos (they're good, trust us) and all the proceeds go towards education. One of their main projects is a bus to get rural children to school. Since no one can resist a slogan like "Drink for the Children," we spent two days convincing passing foreigners into getting drunk for the sake of making the world a better place. Apparently the farm can raise as much as 5 times the profit when a foreigner works the bar. We are proud to say that on our first day we raised 1.5 million kip for the farm (never mind the conversion rates, just think about how big the number 1.5 million is! It's huge!).

While on the farm we also sat in on a Lao children's hip hop class, helped milk goats, learned how to make goat cheese, and ate mulberry pancakes, mulberry fruitshakes, mulberry tea, deep-fried mulberry leaves, and, of course, mulberry mojitos. So far Laos is treating us pretty well.