Had a great New Years eve at a nice little restaurant (Lao Lao Garden) where we grilled water buffalo over an open fire. They take out the middle tile of the table and put a bucket of coals there instead which you can grill over. Great fun and delicious! The restaurant is set on the hillside and has a great garden out back where you can sit around a small bonfire (great for keeping the winter chills off).

After we'd eaten, we ordered bubbles for the New Year (Chinese Happy News sparkling 'wine' - at US$5 for 1 1/2 litres, the price can't be beat, but it tastes like berry cordial) . Then a whole bunch of people started turning up to celebrate the New Year there, and a couple sat down at our table. After talking with them for 5 minutes in english, it turned out that they were also Swedish! Small world :) So we celebrated the New Year with some fellow swedes over a bottle of dodgey Chinese bubble. Nice!

The whole of Luang Prabang centre is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site. There are 66 temples in town, 32 of which are active. The whole town was used by the french as a place to get away from the hustle and bustle of life. Even back just before WWII it took longer to get to Luang Prabang by riverboat up the Mekong from Saigon than it took to get a steamship from Saigon to Paris. Talk about getting away from it all.

The whole city has a really great vibe, there are loads of cafes, restaurants, temples, handicraft shops and even a wine bar or two. The architecture is pretty much french colonial and there are lots of really lovely houses here. We've loved everything else in Laos, and it feels like it just keeps getting better the further north we go - incredible.

Being a Buddhist country, the locals practise alms giving to the monks every morning. Seeing as there are 32 working temples here in Luang Prabang, that's a lot of monks wandering around in the early hours of the morning collecting food for their 2 daily meals .

From the Wikipedia:
In Buddhism, alms or almsgiving is the respect given by a lay Buddhist to a Buddhist monk. The monk will then pray for the giver's family or requested others. It is not charity as presumed by Western interepreters. It is closer to a symbolic connection to the spiritual and to show humbleness and respect in the presence of normal society. The visible presence of monks is a stablizing influence. The act of alms giving assists in connecting the human to the monk and what he represents.

Seeing the procession of monks walking silently along, receiving the offerings was pretty incredible. Tens and hundreds of monks just walking along silently receiving their daily rice from hundreds of believers along the way. There were a lot of poor kids who would stand their with a box or a basket and the monks would pass on some of their offerings to these kids.

Unfortunately the whole thing here has become some what of a tourist spectacle . To be honest it felt like a lot of the tourists there thought that they were at the zoo photographing animals in a cage, not standing there witnessing a solemn ritual. There are signs up around town giving recommendations on how you should behave and observe the ritual, but either most people hadn't read that or they just didn't care, as long as they got their photo.

It felt a bit weird really. We kept to the opposite side of the road, didn't use a flash and generally tried to stay out of the way. The contrast of all of these bright orange robes against the drab colours of the early morning (it starts around sunrise) was just incredible to see.

Other than that, we've spent a lot of time just taking in the ambiance of town. Wandering around the back streets looking at the buildings, strolling around the temples, visiting Tat Kuang Si waterfall (the best yet) and generally just chilling out.

We'll be here at least one more day and then it's probably off up the Mekong to the Thailand border and leaving Laos behind. That's the plan at the moment, but if the situation in Thailand gets worse then we'll change our minds and go somewhere else. Keeping a close eye on what's happening in Bangkok and elsewhere.