Luang Prabang, Laos

This place is awesome. Today I rented a trek mountain bike for the day and cycled outside of town to some lesser known waterfalls. There are some really popular ones, which I will visit in days to come, but for now just exploring the lesser known roads was fun.

It’s so nice to be on the bike again and I am almost as excited to get back to the States and ride as I am to do anything else once I’m there. The roads here were pretty good; there was little traffic and after a while I turned off the “bigger” road and followed a gravel road for about 4 km.

I saw so much random stuff today on a short bike ride that I’m still trying to grasp it. Where to begin? As far as on the bike, I cycled over a live snake, I almost crashed into a herd of cattle or water buffalo (not sure what they were), saw a man put a goat in something resembling a burlap sack, flip it on its side and then drive off with it straddling a scooter, and raced a kid (probably 7 years old) on an electric bicycle for the better part of a kilometer – he was fast!

Once I got to the hiking start for the waterfalls, I parked the bike and hiked up to the falls. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the top. The entire way I was swatting awake mosquitoes and random bugs. All was going smooth, until I looked down and had a spider the size of a deck of cards on my shirt, where I proceeded to flip out in the middle of the jungle almost rolling down the side of the mountain, haha (I laugh now but at the time I was screaming like a little girl). The falls weren’t that impressive, but it was nice to be in the shade for a while before heading back out on the bike and hitting up the hills again.

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