My brother outside my apartment in Bangkok! Welcome to Bangkok Brother!

Hello and welcome to the wonderful land of Laos, which really should be spelled and pronounced "Lao" but some French administrator screwed THAT one up big time back when they were colonizing away. We spent a couple days lazing around Luang Prabang up in the mountains, a perfect little colonial chic city that has actually been preserved as opposed to run over with a six-lane highway (at least for now) and went on a "hill tribe" trek in the mountains where we hung out in a hill tribe village and harrassed leetle hill tribe children, watched dudes with no pants on set traps for fish and birds etc. and lost ourselves in the mountain wilderness of Laos. Enjoy.

Hill tribe kids hangin' tight. Funny, they look just like non-hill tribe kids. Oops, don't tell the tourists that! These three girls with their arms around each other were inseperable ... they were the Three Musketeers. I think their names were Courtney, Kelly and Heather -- at least, that's what I called them. It's recess time from school -- the guide dropped us off in these kids village while they were supposed to be studying but all they did was stare at us out the window so that was that.

Woo hoo! During recess the kids all separated into various age groups and mostly got down with this jump the string game ... it's even harder than it looks, you've got to do some kind of sideways flip thing in the air when you do it, you don't just leap over. And all the girls did it too ... WITH their skirts on. They would leap and flip while carefully holding their skirts together with one hand -- remind me again why women aren't ruling the world? There's one little girl doing it pictured above!

Pick-up sticks! Or something along those lines. It looked fun though. The girls wouldn't let me move in one their game though -- chickens.

Treacherous mountain jungle and the wild, dangerous beasts prowling within ...

Trekkin' ... that's Nancy hanging out with one half of a very nice couple from Montreal who joined us on our sortie d'Hill Tribes.

Poinsettias ... everywhere! In the mountains of Laos! Who knew?

The Wandering Jew next to the Wandering Jew. Badda bing ... you know we couldn't wait to take this one.

Nancy's photo study of a big scary spider web and the big scary spider that made it (you can kind of see it in that close up of the hole). I'm surprised she didn't try to take it out and play with it.

Sleeping bat in a cave we "spelunked" during our hill tribe tour. Not that there were any hill tribe people in the cave, I note. Guess who took this photo as well ...

Hill tribe flowers and a hill tribe butterfly.

Beauteous Laotian waterfall and nymph.

Hill tribe turkeys ...

Luang Prabang is full of temples and one of them promised "scenes from the Kama Sutra" (Hinduism hit Laos and much of SE Asia long before Buddhism did and any self-respecting Buddhist temple includes scenes from the Ramayana and other depictions and allusions to Hindu mythology). So I figured, if we're going to hit one LP temple, let's hit the one offering explicit sex. Above is a "thingy" (an architectural term for a decorative thing that connects the wall and the roof), one of many, that supposedly depicts hot Hindu porn. Hmm ... not sure about that, however. Let's tak a closer look ...

A close up ... hot stuff no? Well, no.