Here I am in front of the fountain in the centre of Vientiane.

Here I am standing on the steps of a wat in Veintiane, which is about 300 years old, though some of it was redecorated in the nineteenth century.

Here is rather an old wat (built in the sixteenth century). The most beautiful we saw in Laos.

Here is a painting on the front wall of the main shrine. Photography inside the shrine was probihibited, as is usualy the case

Here is a little reclining buddha who lives in small hut which is on the left in the photo above.

Here I am in front of the 'tree of life' mosaic, at the rear of the main shrine.

Here's a wat with lots of archers engraved on the front. James is adopting the customery pose.


Click on the photograph to see it at a higher resolution.

Here are some engravings we saw outside of another wat we saw.

Here is an aerial view of the national museum, fomerly the royal palace, and the Mekong is just behind.

Inside the palace we saw another version of the Ramayana ballet. Not as dramatic as the one we saw in Java, there were no flames! It was a very young cast doing a lot of synchronised dancing. Here are the monkeys.

Outside the palace we saw these Hmong tribes do a bit of dancing. Thosde pots are full of water.


Click on the image to see what they did next.

When it's hot, as it certainly was when we were there, the spraying water on one's bare skin feels very refreshing.


Fortunately we remembered to bring our swimsuits and so did 15 or so teenage white females. James thinks they were Dutch, but he doesn;t really know since he didn't actually talk to them.

but he was only too keen to get acquainted with the locals.

We then went for a little walk through the jungle. There were some talll trees...

It was also very hot.

The man on the right was a local who helped us carry a few things.

 We took 6 litres of water, but could still have don with more.

  There were also a few creepy crawlies. As well as caterpillars we saw a lot of beautiful butterflies, some dragonflies,  a huge number of beetles, some large grasshoppers, some millipedes and, unfortunately, quite a few leaches.

As well as .drinking our blood they had a go at James' shoe.

Surprisingly, there seemed to be very few birds I'd like to tell you about all the tigers we had to escape from. but there were none.

  Here is a photo I took on our arrival at the village. This a quite a special moment, just to see that villages like this actually exist, wher people lived in huts with thatched roofs. There were a handful of adults and lot of children. As you can see in the photos below, the children like to carry each other around, indeed I never saw them put them done. They liked to play with things, particularly our empty water bottles and food tins and also big ugly beetles.

  Here is the foot-operated mallet the used to crush their grain. The only modern things the people had were the clothes they wore. We did find a few empty bullet cases and a battery that had been left behind by Americans during the Vietnam war.