For having spent only 13 days there, I have a lot of fond memories of Laos.

The LPB Night Life
After months on the road, Luang Prabang is a good place to put down the backpack and chill for a while. Stick around for more than a day and you will discover the top three hangout spots that almost every backpacker in town will inevitably frequent in this order:

1. The night market buffet – For 10,000 Kip (~$1.25) you get all the vegetarian food you can possibly pile on a single plate. Meat eaters have to dish out a few more thousand Kip. This place is wonderful and disgusting at the same time. The first time you go, you can’t believe someplace this great actually exists. By the third night, you try to talk yourself into going somewhere else for dinner — after all, there’s no way those huge piles of food can be fresh night after night — but the pull of the buffet is just too strong.

Really, how can you resist?

2. Utopia – A typical backpacker bar scene. Beerlao, volleyball, and a view of the river. Not to mention it’s a nice walk over after stuffing yourself silly at the buffet.

3. Bowling – Ah, the night’s main event. All the bars in LPB are required to close at 11:30pm sharp; the bowling alley is one of the few places open and serving alcohol past this curfew. Walk out of Utopia around closing time and every tuk-tuk driver in town will be waiting to take truckloads of drunk backpackers to and from the bowling alley. This is the place to be if you want to go out for a good time past midnight. It is as ridiculous and hilarious as it sounds.

Kong Lo Homestay
After visiting Kong Lo Cave, four of us decide to do a homestay in the nearby village. Our host mom is a nice woman with three sons. None of them speak English so our interaction is limited to hand gestures, simple phrases from my Lao phrasebook, and plenty of awkward smiling. Even so, the boys are so sweet and fun to interact with. They put on DVDs of classic Tom & Jerry cartoons from the 90s, which totally bring back my own childhood memories. It’s nice to see that some things are universal.

The woman who gets us settled in informs our host mom that Lalou and I are both vegetarians. For dinner, our host mom prepares vegetable noodles, soup, and sticky rice. She makes this special for Lalou and me to eat at the living room table, while she and the rest of the family eat separately in the kitchen. We want to eat together with the family but decide it’s better to be polite and accept our status as special guests. Halfway into the meal, I find a fish tail in the soup. Further digging reveals a beetle and a cricket floating around in the dish as well. Lalou and I back away from the soup for the rest of dinner. “No meat” is a very subjective concept in Asia.

Our delicious almost-vegetarian homestay dinner

Their home is very basic: a bamboo house on stilts with a large common area, a kitchen with a woodpile for cooking, and a communal outhouse outside. Everyone in the village goes to the nearby river to bathe, a ritual Lalou and I happily participate in that evening. But even the simplest of villages cannot escape the lure of the cell phone. Our host mom’s ringtone is set to a Maroon 5 tune. Every time a phone call comes in, I think how this is the last place in the world I expected to hear Adam Levine belting out a pop ballad.

Our homestay house

Hitching to Vientiane
After the homestay Din and I decide to catch a bus to Vientiane. We do this by literally standing on the side of the road at the main highway junction and hopping on the first bus that pulls over for us. It’s not a luxurious ride — we’re squished in with dozens of locals and freight boxes and the TV is playing a gruesome Hong Kong action movie at max volume — but it’s cheap and gets us where we need to go.

Sometime around dusk there’s a loud bang and the bus breaks down. I don’t quite understand what the problem is, but it takes over an hour to fix. While we wait Din and I walk to a small family shop by the side of the highway, which I accidentally mistake for a restaurant. The family is flummoxed when I ask for khai dao (Lao for fried egg) but is kind enough to bring out their wok and fry eggs for me on the floor of their shop. I don’t realize until it’s too late that they don’t actually serve food here, and then I feel both embarrassed and impressed that they did this for me.

The wok they brought out and plugged in on the floor of the shop

Just to make this for me

We eventually make it Vientiane but my shoes aren’t so lucky. Most long-distance buses in SE Asia require everyone to take off their shoes before boarding. Somewhere between Kong Lo and Vientiane one of my sandals disappears, which is a bit of an issue as it’s the only pair of shoes I’m traveling with. The local guys on the bus watch with amusement as I dig through the pile of shoes by the door to no avail. Eventually the drive takes pity and hands me a replacement pair, and so I arrive in Vientiane in style sporting these on my feet:

[Laos. April 22 – May 4, 2013]