The forest lodge where I spent my time in Laos. It looks really nice but I had to fish a cockroach out of my bag within 15 minutes of arriving. It got better after that.

A nearby floating restaurant. I didn’t visit this one.

The floating restaurant built by the owners of my ecolodge. It was so easy spending hours here doing nothing but looking out at the river.

Kitty!

 

A dirt road I walked down when exploring a nearby village.

 

I think this cow was judging me. It stared at me for a suspiciously long time as I walked past.

Puppy!

Across the river from the ecolodge.

The swimming pool that made up part of the floating restaurant.

Kayaking on that river was really fun. You can’t really tell in the photo but the current was pretty strong; it nearly took me with it a few times.

Sunset as seen from the floating restaurant.

I probably took way too many pictures of this sunset.

Behind Vietnamese, Laotian food is probably the best type of cuisine I’ve sampled on this trip. Beats Thai food hands down.

Arty shot.

One of the things I did while I was here was tag along with the ecolodge owner for the presentation ceremony of a book donation scheme at a local school.

Books being handed out to the local kids.

The ceremony was unexpectedly elaborate, involving a fair bit of picture taking (not just by me) and congratulatory back slapping.

The cute kids at small local village I visited.

This bull looked badass and I had to take a picture of it. Apparently, one of the pastimes here is making bulls fight each other. Marginally better than Spanish bull fighting but not by much.

It’s difficult to tell in this shot but just after sunset, the moon was a deep shade of red for about 10 minutes.

We climbed to the top of this stupa. There was a pretty sweet view from up there.

 

This was the (unspeakably brilliant) entrance to the stupa shown in the last shot.

This Buddha was huge but there were loads of other cool statues here too.

Like this one. I’m pretty sure this dude is chowing down on a human head and has two massive snakes coming out of his arse.

That Luang. The national symbol of Laos and its most important religious monument.

That Luang again.

The sound this bug generated with its wings was ridiculously cool. I feel like it could be a decent base to a dance track if someone sampled it.