This morning John and I took bicycles out for a spin around the quiet town of Luang Prabang in search of a geocache. It would have helped if I had checked the brakes before we left, but I didn't, so we took it slow and I used my flip flops to stop; not a lot of treads on flip flops by the way. We eventually needed to leave our bicycles behind to walk through a road-grading project, but we eventually made it to the small temple that hid the geocache. The monks who lived there were supposedly fine with the geocache location, and so we were free to look around for the cache. I noticed young monks or novices no older than John going about their business, dressed only in orange coloured trunks because it was so hot I suspect. The cache was near a small stupa, which I learned is a Buddhist monument commemorating some event or marking a sacred spot. John eventually tried lifting the spire from the stupa's hemispherical base. When he did so, small ants poured forth in all directions. He reached in and found the small cache consisting of a film case. He was so excited to find the cache that he didn't notice all the ants crawling up his arm until I mentioned it. John must have thought of himself as Indiana Jones finding the holy grail or something.
The afternoon was very hot by my reckoning, but perhaps not so much for the local workers next door to our hotel, who were renovating the nearby property. They had bamboo scaffolding up which looked to be doing the job fine, but what surprised me were two workers doing hard manual labour in black jackets. I don't know if it was cold for them or whether they were protecting themselves from debris as they mixed concrete, but I was hot just looking at them from a partially air conditioned hotel room. I wonder if they would feel the cold bite of a Canadian winter more than me? Or maybe they are just tougher. Probably the latter.
This country seems less developed than just about anywhere else I've been, with the possible exception of Cambodia. We took a taxi to the local swimming pool this afternoon. The taxi looked like someone tried to attach a flat bed from a mini pickup truck to a motorcycle. I wonder who would manufacture these contraptions. I suppose they are much cheaper than a car.
The pool we visited this afternoon was just what we needed to get out of the hotel but still stay cool. I think it was the only pool around and pretty full up with tourists mostly who must also have been there to beat the heat and have some fun like us. The pool would have been fairly big if it was someone's back yard, but not so big compared to a public pool. It was wild west at the pool with many safety violations, like kids and adults jumping from a platform into the shallow end with no lifeguard present. But there was a pool bar and the water wasn't too warm. We had fun.
We went back to the hotel to relax and wait for the sun to go down and the temperature to drop a little before we ventured out again. On the way in I saw a couple of the hotel staff playing a game of hacky sack of sorts. They were keeping a shuttle in the air with their feet, which consisted of something with shortened rooster feathers attached to it.
Here's a dragon at the entrance to the local temple with the geocache. Looks like a snake to me.
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