A very blurry photo of a very cool moment ... we took a two hour boat ride (with plenty of little stops at villages that churn out piles of tourist tchotchokes) to this temple that's housed in a cave. Actually two caves, this is the lower one, the higher one is ... really frickin' high. Love them stairs!

Anyway, inside of each of the caves are hundreds ... nay thousands of Buddha statues (with a good number of Hindu and animist ones thrown in for good measure). Just as we were leaving, a Japanese tour group started having a service at the lower cave, led by their own Japanese Buddhist monk that they brought with them. If you squint you can see them praying and the monk in front in red ... they were peacefully chanting when we left and it gave the whole place a much needed air of ... reality. Because it's nice to be reminded that this isn't there just for us to snap photos of ... it's a functioning temple and means a lot to some of the people (Lao people and other Buddhists) who visit it. Which is why I get really irritated when I see Buddha heads and statues snatched from temples in SE Asia in Western museums. They're not relics of a bygone era ... you just snatched their Jesus on a cross for ... Buddha's Sake!