Muang Ngoi

I slept amazing last night, easily the best sleep I've had since we got over here. I didn't get up until about 11:00AM. Court was up about 9:30.

Life in Muang Ngoi totally too slow for Courtney.

We had brunch, then met up with Shen and Mark and Nick, and we all booked a boat and went to the waterfall. Nice, but no comparison to the waterfall in Luang Prabang. To get the waterfall, we have to rent a boat (10,000 kip each) so we can get to another village downstream, then we have to buy a ticket at the village (2000 kip/person), then hire a guide (5000 kip for the group), who takes us to it. The Laos people are catching on to capitalism pretty good!!! Our guides were a couple of teenage Laos local girls.

AFter we returned from the waterfall, we sat with our boat driver and his helper and did Lao Lao shots (Lao Lao is Lao whiskey), we each had 4 shots. Read in Rough Guide (and had others tell us), it's considered very rude to refuse Lao Lao when offered by a local. It's pretty good stuff. Hopefully the captain of our seaworthy vessel isn't to drunk to captain us back to Muang Ngoi!!

WE made it back to Muang Ngoi ok, and went home, and met up with Shen and Mark and Nick and an older German woman (45 years old) at the restaurant. I started feeling sick to my stomach. I'd been not been feeling right all day (constipated, and going poop lots), now it was moving to my stomach.

About 8:00, Court and I walked back to the guest house, we were going to rest for a bit, then meet them down at the river for another bonfire. Well, we laid down, got very lazy, the power went off about 10:00ish, I asked Court if she was going to the campfire, she said now, so I blew out our candle and we went to sleep.

Other notes, serious or not:
- Muang Ngoi only has electricity from about 7:00PM-10:00PM.
- A lot of bomb casings being used as fences, flower pots, etc., presumable left overs from the Vietname war.
- Saw one boat that was made out of fuselage of an old airplace.
- Nick from Winnipeg is a wholesaler of pot smoking pipes back in Canada. He's a total pot-head.
- The reason for the increase in accomodation price: The gov't jacked the price, and is taking half.
- May have mentioned this before: most pop is sold in glass bottles...it tastes so much better from a glass bottle than a can (or plastic bottle).
- The talk this evening got into global corporations having too much power, and one guy mentioned that diesel engines will run on vegetable oil with no changes to the engine or to horsepower or anything.
- I got a new nickname from Courtney today: Poopy-pants