Saturday, February 04, 2006

Dancing with the Locals, Pak Beng, Laos

After our first day of 8 hours we overnighted in a town called Pak Beng and had the pleasure of staying in our grottiest guesthouse yet... I was just too exhausted and fed up to walk further up the hill to find anything better... It had paint-chipped wooden boards for walls, suspect bedding (thankfully we have our own), a murky pink mosquito net, and a variety of mismatched pieces of torn, dirty lino (linoleum) on the floor. Nice! It was, however, just going to be for one night...and we survived....just!

Later that night we went to a festival that blared out the loudest music and had an impressive echo over the microphone. The lights would dim whenever the guy talked on the mic, so the power was a little suspect. We had a lot of fun dancing with the locals though. They were lovely, friendly people. As you can see Martin's lady thought he did a great job of dancing a traditional Lao circle dance with her (all thumbs up from her).

I ended up needing the loo at one point and was directed towards the 'Ladies' - some bushes next to some local women peeing ... So they kindly stood 'on guard' for me, and then they invited me back to their table offering me fruit to munch on. I was obviously drawing some attention being at their table as many people came over, and even though I couldn't understand the language, I'm pretty sure they came to ask my new friends where they had found me. It seemed they were quite amused to hear where! * Mush

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