Travels Four: Nightmarkets and Roosters in Laos

I took to describing Laos as Asian Mexico. With darker, different looking people, some who live in tiny primitive villages, with palm trees, amongst south asian hills, its a very different environment and culture. I found it somewhere between, boring, peaceful, friendly, reticent, and primitive and lovely. There has not been much tourism in Laos and the village that my tour, you have to pay for tours, went through was fairly new to tourism. White people were amazing for the kids who despite being poor by any standard were very quick to smile and say "Sabadee!" The village was 200 people living in shacks in secondary forest. There were seven year old girls with babies on there backs next to five year old boys with machete's and lush green hills everwhere around them. It was amazing for me to walk through a village like this.

My days in Laos began at about 5 am when the roosters all over town began screaming at me. I tried to sleep untill about seven and then gave up. The Laos people are known to westerners as being some of the nicest people in South Asia. There is an expression; "Vietnam grows the rice, Cambodia watches the rice grow, Laos listens to the rice grow." This is just to say that they are
pretty relaxed in Laos.

My two favorite activities in Laos were drinking boat loads of tea from the balcony of my hotel overlooking a small street, sleeping dogs, roosters, an old couple, palm trees, and then the hills and sky. The other was going to the night market. The market was for three days lit by candles because electricity was out between 5pm and 7:30 - this was pretty normal. The night market was all food and it was beautiful, cheap and so good. I have no idea what i ate. Mostly i think it was weird vegetables and pork with hurbs, a lot of different rice cakes, and man I miss it. It was not so different from very good thai food from New York.

The bus ride from Laos back to Dali was very long but I had a bed which made it way better then my 48 hour ride on Greyhound a few years ago. We stopped for food and I slept and the 26 hours passed quicker than you'd think.

I'm back in Dali now and would love to write more about Christmas in Lao, and New Years in Dali when I have the chance.