Luang Prabang back to Veng Vieng!

So my cold went away after 4 days of pretty much lying down and only appearing for food. And by then it was two days to Christmas. so I figured I'd just hang around and wait for that to be over with before moving again. I did manage to take some photos though. And by some I mean lots...

Another bamboo bridge.

Front of Vat Visounnarath

Side of Vat Visounnarath

And of course with all the lying down doing nothing I started playing with HDR's and Panoramas some more.

HDR from same spot.

HDR of a sunset

Panorama of a bamboo bridge

This is out the front of the national museum, I don't think it's an actual working temple though, it didn't have a name.

And then back to non HDRs... They were annoying me and I can't get them quite right.

Elephant on the side of faketemple(tm)

Shiny

Shinier

Another non HDR view!

More seven headed naga. Thailand had five headed naga's with very few seven headed in places. Laos only seems to have the seven headed variety. Or seven in one mouth, like above... Does this actually count as eight?

The top view of the markets.

And then it was time for Christmas. Here's a photo of my lunch:

Beer. And two glasses of Lao Lao. Which is 50% alcohol. Which meant the rest of Christmas was spent lying down...

And then finally, on Boxing Day, it was time to leave. My original plans were to head north, but because I had spent so much time being sick I started to head south again as I have a plane to catch to Vietnam on the 3rd of January. And as I'm an expert in panoramas now, here are all of them from yesterday:

I made it to Bor Nam Oom guesthouse which is five bungalows next to some hot springs on the side of the main highway. I'd read about it the day before as I was trying to stay near that awesome mountain. They have small little bungalows next to the hot springs and it's popular for cyclists as it's a days riding from Vang Vieng. I stayed in the one closest to the road but I didn't get much sleep because of the traffic. All through the night there were trucks and often they would pull up and leave the truck idling while the driver went off to swim in the hot springs. I think by 3am the traffic stopped completely but then it started back up at 6am. But it's still a good spot, maybe stay in the bungalows further away from the road though.

This was the view from the front of the tiny bungalow in the morning.

The sun just appearing over the stupid wires.

And the hot springs! Steam coming off it in the morning. On the left side of the road is the restaurant, cheap good food! And beer!

All the locals use the springs as their local baths so there is a stream of people coming to clean themselves, their clothes, and their teeth in this water. I wondered how much of the scum on the bottom of the pool was made up of what other people washed off themselves. It's not too hot though, probably mid twenties, but that's much warmer than the winter morning.

Then for today it was a quick 77km run to Vang Vieng. The cyclists that were staying there were also headed there, but I beat them here because I'm awesome fast! But I did also lie to them about how far away Vang Vieng was, my GPS told me 53km, but then once I got on the road it corrected itself to 77km... Well at least I'm not pedaling 24km more than I thought I was.

Just down the road from the guesthouse I found this view.

More roads

More Mountains, and fields.

Then I turned around and saw this!

And now I'm in Vang Vieng again. Found a place that is half the price of what I paid last time I was here. I'll stay here two nights then stop one more time before getting to Vientiane again for new years eve.