10-23 (Monday) Home to Luang Praband

We slept great in our $8 room last night. We only had a fan but after the sun went down it got cool. I had to getup in the night and turn the fan off it was so cold.

The driver took us to breakfast where we had dinner last night. Right next door was the MAG office. This is the group that is dismantling all the land mines in Lao. We went in and saw all the artillery they have been pulling out of the ground in this area. 30years after the war they are still trying to make this country safe to live in.

The driver’s boss called and asked to speak to me. He wanted to know if we were coming home today. I told him we were. I told him we wanted to go to a Mong Village before we came home. He said we could and he wouldn’t charge us. Going to the village was a bomb. We thought we’d see tribal dress but NO, we hardly saw anyone. They were all at the fields working. We wasted about 2 ½ hours going there and walking through the village. We could have gotten back to Luang Prabang a lot sooner if we hadn’t gone to that boring village. We once again took 6 hours to cross the mountains arriving “home” at 4:30. We gave our driver a $6 tip.

We were back at our same guest house but had to move to one of the cottages since the “big” rooms were all taken. We were most unhappy with our new digs. It was way to small, the bathroom wasn’t as nice and the sink didn’t hold water for clothes washing. The positives were that it had A/C and two beds. We bitched about it.

We decided to get away from it so we walked to town for a nice dinner. We tried a new place which was lovely. We split a chicken dish with ginger and onions. Yummy! We had garlic bread and I had a glass of wine. Afterwards Joyce wanted to show me some sort of money belt she wanted to buy. We walked way down the street to where she had seen it but she couldn’t find it. There was only one so they must have sold it. It really didn’t matter because neither of us had any money.

On our way home we stopped off to do the internet with the few cents we had left. After that – she didn’t have enough to pay for her net – I only had about 6 cents left!

We went back to the room and bitched some more!