Day Two

We started off the day today setting up our bikes for the first ride of what we have begun to call the Tour de Laos.  We began the day with a 30km cycle to the Kuang Si Waterfalls.  These are an amazing set of small waterfalls that are fed by a much larger, much more impressive waterfall.  There are several pools that you can go swimming in so we took the opportunity to do just that.  In one of the pools there is a knotted rope attached to a tree so that you can swing from it and jump into the pool.  Of course I had to give it a go.  On my 3rd go, my hands were slipping from the rope so I held on tighter, but kept slipping.  By the time I hit the water my hand was hurting so I swam towards the edge to get out.  As I was swimming, I looked at my hand to see why it was hurting and found a rather badly dislocated middle finger on my left hand.  I got out of the pool and headed over to some of the group that was sitting nearby and announced that I needed a medic.  Someone suggested that it needed to be pulled back out, but no-one was that keen to do it, so i did it myself.  They helped me bandage it up and use my ring finger as a splint.  The result is the picture you see below.  It would have been great to have a picture before I pulled it out, but you'll just have to take my word on it that it was impressive.

All of this excitement happened before lunch!! We had lunch at the waterfall and then spent some time taking photos.  At the site of the waterfall is also a bear sanctuary.  These beautiful sun bears are being saved from ending up on dinner plates around Asia.  The organisation, free the bears (http://www.freethebears.org.au), was started by an Australian woman named Mary Hutton.  We spent some time watching the bears have their lunch and taking some photos of them.  We then jumped back on our bikes to head back to the hotel; another 30km.  We freshened up and then went into town for dinner at a nice little bar where one of our group, Simon, was playing his ukulele and Alicia was singing.  It was a nice night and the food was great.  I ate Luang Prabangers & Mash.  It was the traditional dish as we know it, but the sausages were typical of this area of Laos.  The place itself didn't really have any traditional Laotian food though, which was a little disappointing.

Tomorrow is probably going to be one of the toughest days as there are lots of big hills.  It is also the day that we leave Luang Prabang and ride towards Phonsavan.  As my finger is now throbbing and I have a big day tomorrow, I'm going to sign-off.  No guarantee that I'll have Internet access tomorrow so I'll update the blog again when I do.  I'll leave you with an image of Luang Prabang (it's off in the distance) from the top of the highest hill we climbed today.