I finally made it to my first real milestone, Luang Prabang. I thought it would take about 3 days to get there, but it took 8 of steady driving to get from Da Nang to Luang Prabang.
The last few hours going into Luang Prabang are exceedingly beautiful. Riding roller coasters up and down through Laos villages lining the mountain ridges.
I stopped along the side of the road at a little Loas house where they were selling food. It was about $.40 for the spiciest noodle soup I have ever tasted in my entire life.
These kids ran up to me interested in who I was and the little girl started shoving tissue paper in her noses. Her Mom got mad which only made her want to do it more. I’ve never seen anyone crack themselves up more.
I had my first wreck on the last 20km into Luang Prabang. I was taking a turn to the left and for whatever reason the bike just fell out from under me. I slid with the bike laying on my left leg all the way down the road. The whole time I was just thinking, “why did that happen.” I wouldn’t find out until later why. I hit my left arm and hip pretty hard but I picked the bike up, put it back on the road and drove extremely slowly the rest of the way down to Luang Prabang. A couple times I could feel it try to fall again and I just could not figure out why.
I made it to mad monkey hostel around 4 pm. It’s a little bit of a party hostel but still pretty nice. It’s got a nice pool upstairs and the rooms and beds are pretty nice.
Bobby, one of the Laos guys working at Mad Monkey turned 30 so I decided to celebrate with him. There was a music quiz at the hostel that one of my teammates knew almost every song to. The team next to us were 3 really drunk British girls and we ended up tying with them. We had 2 options for how to break the tie. One was to guess a hard song and the other was to send one teammate to chug a beer and whoever finished first won. I volunteered to chug and I downed the glass in the time it took the drunk girl to finish a quarter of it. It was a moment of glory for me.
We drank quite a lot and at 11pm we went to a bowling alley which is apparently the only thing to do at that hour in Luang Prabang. It was Bobby’s choice anyways. I was pretty lousy at bowling but it was fun hanging out with the crew. Around 2am we finally headed back to the hostel. I drove and probably should not have, but followed Bobby back. We made one stop to get barbecue which was ungodly spicy like everything else here. When we got back I finally headed to bed.