Laos

Laos is a beautiful country with green everywhere and almost untouched by humans. Agriculture is still the major source of income of Laos people and the main crop being rice.

When travelling from one part of the country to another, one can see absolutely stunning landscapes. There are mountains after mountains of green lush foliage with clouds hanging out at the top of the mountains. 

Laos cities are still fairly small (Laos population is under 6.5 M) and usually everything (restaurants, bars, etc.) are closed by 11:30pm. In some smaller towns it is even earlier than that – so better not feel like a midnight snack because ain’t gonna happen!

Roosters
Laotian have roosters and chickens everywhere and chances are that you will have at least one living next to your hotel – we did in each city we visited. The roosters start a conversation with their pal a few kilometers away and chit chat back and forth for hours. I witnessed a conversation starting as early as 3:30am by the rooster living next to our hotel, but I didn’t get why because it was still dark. The neighbor rooster had the decency to ignore “our” rooster until at least 4:00am. Pheww, thank god for this courtesy for the human sleepers; a well brought up rooster! 

However, Alain was getting seriously annoyed with them and kept wondered how come none of the Laotian restaurants had roosters on their menu. Lucky for any of the roosters that Alain never caught one because it would definitely have been BBQ’d; I’m sure Alain was secretly...well let's be honest here, openly dreaming about it!

Traveling
When we went to Laos it was during the rainy season, and while attempting to travel by minivan from one city to the next, we got stopped because of a landslide. A landslide, how cool right? Well it was quite something at the beginning but after waiting for at least five hours for a “backo” to show up and clear it up, I was quite ready to leave the sight. We still had 4-5 hours of driving left to do and had not eaten since six O’clock in the morning and it was 4:00pm by the time we started moving again. The leaving was a real capharnaum as both sides wanted to go at the same time but only one side of the road was cleared and there were vehicles in both lanes on each side of the mudslides! Really smart, and no authorities in sight to direct the traffic!! Hahaha!

 

A few vehicles have tempted their luck to cross the mud, all except maybe one or two got stuck and needed substantial help and digging to get unstuck.

Food
The food in Laos was good, lots of meat everywhere though, but I managed to find vegetarian options. The first dish below was something totally different than what I ever had before in Asia, typical Laotian food apparently. It was a fried mixture of cashews, garlic, chilies and other leaves; very flavorful and crunchy (and no, there were no insects in it I guarantee it).

Money

The money used in Laos is the Laotian Kip (LAK), and $1 CAD = $8,150 LAK, so you can imagine that in no time you end up working with hundred of thousands and millions of LAK when purchasing certain things. Since in Canada we are so rich and we deal with millions all the time, needless to say that we had to pay extra attention the number of zeros in the numbers to do the conversion in Canadian dollars. Ohh, and it felt good and scary at the same time to be withdrawing millions out of your account from the ATM.

Construction

And if you need structural support while constructing something, leave it to the good old bamboo stick to come to the rescue!