Laurie's World

So here I sit in the departure lounge at the Luang Prabang airport. Everything turned out ok!! One wonky moment for me when the immigration guys ASKED me if I stayed at the Saynamkhan in Luang Prabang. I was thinking could my worst nightmare be true? Regardless, I answered “yes” and he nodded then went back to his “mysterious whatever they do behind the counter thing”. They always make you stand way back on the 2 footprints on the floor. They take your photo when you come and when you leave. But even when the camera isn’t doing its thing, you have to stay on the footprints. When we were arriving, I may have inadvertently leaned up on the counter while they were “doing the mysterious behind the counter thing” and they shooed me off pretty fast. It’s the same everywhere we go here. Not just Laos.

So All’s well that ends well and my biggest concern of the moment is…how do I get myself in there?????

Instead of out here?

I think I’m a VIP, just ask Troy….poor guy has to deal with me 😉

Yet here I sit…

I’m still happy, see my happiness oozing out of that airport selfie? It’s really relief, but that is often easily confused with general happiness! Perhaps it was my eagerness to get out of the vicinity of my hotel, or my rule following tendencies but I insisted on being to the airport two hours early for our flight. It is an international flight after all. It takes 2 hours to get from Bangkok from here. So we are here in plenty of time. The snack vendor supplies you with a free wifi code if you buy something, so that is fate intervening on my behalf. I had 25,500 kip left in my wallet and I was planning on putting it in the tip box at the hotel before I left, but in my general haste (AKA- not looking back) I didnt. So I had the required 25,000 kip for a moderately overpriced ice cream so that I could secure the code so I could at the least let my #1 fans know I’m not either bankrupt or in a Laos jail. As I told my mom this morning, I would make a terrible terrible prisoner. I also now know I would make a terrible POW after the whole foot massage thing….

So just rousted myself after an atrocious nights sleep. It had real promise as I shut my eyes at 9:45pm, I was exhausted after all, pushing that bike through the foothills of Laos for 4 km. but I woke up at 2:30 after having a wild dream that the bike guy had a friend at the airport and despite the fact that I have my passport and departure card in hand, they still hold me there. Yikes….and you know how real things are when you wake up in the middle of the night from a dream, and then how your mind continues to chew away and come up with other awful ideas.

Regargdless, the sun is shining big and bright this morning and as I open the shutters on our patio, I see the bikes are gone. So this means one of three things, first, they were stolen. Which is bad, but I hope not bad for me since I turned them over to the hotel and I don’t see how they could hold me responsible for theft. (But once again-we don’t get to make the rules here). Secondly, they were able to start and drive them BOTH away! Yay! (Best case scenario) Or they couldn’t get it to start and they trailered it, and perhaps have made a decision that they should call their friend at the airport and have me detained. This would be really bad…..

Regardless, no matter what happens, it is out of my hands. We (mostly me bcz Troy is pretty chill) have 2.5 more hours of this torture before we check out 😳

I suppose I should finish the blog entry from yesterday! I’m sure everyone wonders what there was a first time for? It was Tuesday night’s massage. We tried a new place that Rob from Utopia recommended. It was 60,000 kip for a Lao massage which is $1.25 more than we were paying 😉 hope it is worth it. I chickened out and just went for my usually very safe foot massage. Not sure what the right decision was, but the foot massage ended up being the worst torture session I have ever endured. And I do t use the term torture lightly….. I’ve had very deep massage before, I prefer it to the relaxing mamby pamby skin tickle you get at some places. (Had ONE of these in CM this year-didn’t go back to that place) but omg, this was brutal, I had such high hopes as I got to have the massage laying down on a mat instead of sitting up in a chair. This almost always yields a better footie than when up in a chair, they can get all around vs just coming at your feet and legs from the end of your feet. Anyways, you’ve heard me say that I get a little sad when they move to the second foot bcz then I know it’s half over! This time I was praying for her to switch to I could know it was at least half over. She found every tendon, bone and imaginary knot (spoiler alert I don’t have any) in my feet, calves and thighs. She ground the snot out of the top of my feet. Tell me…how many muscles are in the top of ones feet? None, that is exactly how many. I told her twice to be softer, lighter, I gestured, I flinched, I pulled my foot away, I sweated (literally broke out in a ful body sweat in an aircon room with fans also). It was crazy. I almost stopped it, but didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She was just incredibly strong. She did this all with her hands. She didn’t even back off from fatigue or anything at ANY point. I fact, she gained steam I think. I can guarantee you if I didn’t have the tan I do on my legs they would be black and blue. You can see bruising even through the tan, and it hurts to put on lotion 2 days later. I hate to be a baby, but defintely the first time for me ever wanted/begging/praying for a footie to be over.

Troy on the other hand said it was one of the best massages he has ever had….GO FIGURE. Either way we didn’t go back yesterday bcz I blew our massage money on a first class tuk tuk ride for my Scoopy scooter. 😳

The desk guy brought me my passport! Omg…..I’m so grateful. I guess it doesn’t mean the scooter mafia won’t still come after us, we do have another 15hours here, but at least I have my passport.

Mom, I promise PINKY SWEAR to never go up a dirt lane again, especially one that runs along a creek. So perhaps it only cost me an extra 200,000 kip ($25 usd) on top of the $40 for the bikes and 50,000 kip ($6.25) for gas, which we didn’t use hardly any of. I gave the very kind kids who let us ride back with them 100,000 kip to offset their 160,000 kip ride. They were very insistent on NOT taking it, but I insisted they take it! I had to force them actually. So hopefully they have a beer or two tonight on us and think about how nice they were to us. I did have to tell them about the tuk tuk full of the Undisclosed nationality that refused us, to make them understand WHY I was so grateful. They were gobsmacked! Yes I know that’s twice I’ve used that word in my blog in the last few days.

The tuk tuk driver was mad I gave them money. He kind of got on me about it. We think it’s bcz he thought I wasn’t going to also give him money. Yes, I had every intention of giving him money too. He charged me 100,000 kip for the ride in, so he made out VERY well today. That was 20,000 kip more than the first kind tuk tuk driver was going to charge me, before his passengers said “no”. Not over that…..can you tell?

Ok, got a photo….yikes eh? So you can see then condition of the “road” on the left there! Barely qualifies as anything, and this was a “dotted line” on the map. We all know what a dotted line means right? It means DON’T DO IT!!!! Hahahahahaha. It may have been just fine other than that goofy creek getting in my way. Why do theses things happen to me? 😩😩 Cuz I’m out there livin’ life! 😳😳

I should start off by saying no one was hurt. So no need for that kind of concern. But I’m sitting here on my patio, it’s 5:36pm and I’m sweating bullets waiting to see how much it is going to cost me to get my passport back.

We did rent bikes this morning and headed off for the day with such excitement and promise. It was going wonderfully, in fact I had just told Troy that I wanted to rememeber everything about today bcz it was the best day ever! We had been riding for about 2.5 hours and we had stopped out by the Kuang Si waterfalls for our lunch break. Here are a couple pix, me eating my favourite sandwich, so thoughtfully purchased before we headed out. And a selfie from RIGHT before we headed up the lane. DON’T I LOOK HAPPY???????

We ate our sandwiches, had some water, then we make the decision to go up a dirt road that pretty quickly ended up being a just a garbage laden goat trail that ran along a small creek (this part is important). We were less than 100 metres up this path when I decided to call it off, we should turn back, I figured it was a no go. So we start to turn our bikes around, I can’t even believe this happened, other than it did, I lost control going like no miles an hour, I was just doing a U turn and I drove the bike straight into the creek. So YA, that happened. It wasn’t deep and there wasn’t much of a current so not dangerous at all, it was maybe 8-10 inches? Not sure, Troy took a picture which of course I don’t have at this time. Anyway, the two of us dragged the bike out of the creek and tried to start it, but it wouldn’t start. Of course not, the thing is full of water. So we have to walk it back down to the road and we tried everything. It is an automatic so we couldn’t roll start it, even though we tried that. We couldn’t kick start it despite many attempts. So what do you do…..you start pushing. Accepting our fate, hoping a tuk tuk would drive by with room for me and the bike. I pushed prolly about one km and along came a tuk tuk, he stops and the driver assures me he can get the bike in. He will charge me 80,000 kip ($10- worth every penny at this point). He starts the process and the customers in the back stop him and say “no”, he says, “really, it’s ok”, they say “no” so he says sorry to me, puts the tailgate up and has to drive away, not one of the girls looked back at me. I BET NOT! Close to 100 degrees in the blazing sun 23 km from town and they couldn’t look me in the eye. I’ll keep quiet about their nationality. Oh well, that is ok, I’ll perservere.

Another tuk tuk stops in another km or so. Full of strapping young to middle age french guys, very eager to help, everyone of them spent several minutes trying to kick start it. To no avail, but no room in their tuk tuk even if they wanted to have us get in. Ok, so I keep walking/pushing and every so often, coasting, if there was a Downhill. We make it to a small village, 4km from where I started, and stop at a “service station” I use this term loosely. They spoken no English and they simply thought I needed gas. I am sure everyone who passed me thought I was a stupid foreigner who had run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Little did they know I had almost a full tank. So no help from the service station. By now the battery is dead from trying to start it so many times. So my options are really limited. We keep walking. Troy sees a tuk tuk and he flags it down for me. It is full of some young very kind European backpackers. The fellow in the group tries really really hard to kick start it. Nothing…..so they are happy to have us hijack their ride, they all squished to one side of the tuk tuk and the bike took the other side. I rode in the front with the driver. So a 4km walk of shame plus a 20 km ride of shame. It’s been a long weird day. Now the part that concerns me of course is the fact that you have to turn over your passport to rent a bike here. So to get it back I am pretty much at their mercy. I’m hoping that the bike miraculously dries out and the battery regenerates enough for it to start before the guy who dropped it off comes back to get it. If not then I have heard horror stories about these sorts of these things. It happens everywhere is SE Asia, they hold your passport ransom until you pay, they just bring more guys over if you look like you want to get scrappy about it. Hoping it goes ok and I didn’t just buy an overpriced crappy used scooter in Laos that I won’t be able to do anything with….

I’ll keep you posted.

So when we wander about, we sometimes see really nifty things. Like this for example…

A little closer…..

Isn’t that amazing. I have seen that exact item at the dollar store in my home town of Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada. It is actually a contraption you ca wearability a hat to shade yourself from the sun. But what better use that shading the Buddha here in Laos. Always nice to see a little piece of home when we are traveling.

This blog entry is shorter than I was thinking as the weather is looking very good today and since it is our last full day in Luang Prabang, we have rented svooters and will be heading out. I bet I have something good to blog about tonight 😉

Well, we didn’t get A huge amount accomplished today, but we did decide around 2pm to go on a walk. The one thing I simply had to make sure to do today was pick up our laundry, fortunately I remembered around 6:30😉

We headed out left from our hotel to walk along the Nam Khan River. We perhaps would have headed out earlier, but there was a rain shower that passed through (just to raise the humidity I am sure). When we got up to the top of the peninsula, we encountered a small park like setting. I can’t really call it a “park” although some may. There was a lovely view of where the Nam Khan and the Mekong rivers meet.

I think they have spectacular flowers here is SE Asia. 🌹🌻🌺

So I saw this little contraption. Looks like a roomba for the lawn, do you see the docking station in the background? So what I’m not sure is, if it is to pick up leaves etc, or to keep the grass snipped. It wasn’t moving when we passed it. I really wonder, maybe this would change my perspective on yard work if I had one.

We walked the whole outer ring of the peninsula (not really much of a walk-prolly 20-30 minutes if one was focused-which we were NOT) before we looped back and came across the Royal Palace museum. It was to close at 4pm and it was just shy of 3:45pm so we slipped in and took a couple photos.

Word is, this place is kind of cool, it’s been kept pretty much as the Royal family lived in it before they were ousted in 1975. Including the garage which still has their cars in it. Not sure what the whole story is there and why they didn’t get to take their stuff, maybe a research project for another day.

This is a temple on the grounds….as always, beautiful. Lucky enough to have a Chinese fashion model on the stairs at the time I was taking my picture. Hahahahahahahaha JK

We have been toying with the idea of eating at this buffet style open food market place. It is pretty sketchy looking and certainly isn’t the most hygenic place to eat. Most travel sites advise it’s best to dine before 8pm. But it seems adventurous and we are all about the adventure. So for 15,000 kip (less than $2) we can take a bowl and fill it with whatever we see in front of us. Minus the meat I think, that is extra.

Some stuff we recognize, some we don’t, so of course we only take the stuff we recognize. Like noodles…there is something that looks like Mac and cheese (it wasn’t) and some stuff that looked like potato (it was) everything else fell on the spectrum between. It was not the worst thing we have eaten (I’ll get to that) but it wasn’t worth much more. We decided one bowl and we would share. So if we need to toss and start over somewhere else we are not too heavily financially committed.

Of course there are no forks, so this slows ME down tremendously, as I’m not known for being adept at using chopsticks. Troy was fine of course, he is proficient with this tool. Regardless, we should know in a few hours if this was an OK decision. It’s now been 2 hours since we ate, and I still feel fine, so I’m hopeful. There were 3 Italians that came along just as were were finishing putting our bowl together and believe it or not they talked the lady down to 10,000 kip each for their bowls. I was flabbergasted. Seriously gobsmacked that they would try to pay this lady $1.25 instead of $1.75. That and they piled their bowls right as high as they could, and poured mounds of her sweet chili sauce over all of it. I get that some bapackers need to travel on a budget, but that seemed a little extreme to me. The poor lady needs to at least break even….

On the way out of the back alley that hosts this spectacle every night there are several places that have “various forms of meat”. Everything from bbq chicken and pork (recognizable) to what look like sparrows with the necks broken and skewered on the bbq. I’m sure there are frogs and all kinds of delicacies….I have read about the buffalo sausage that they make here and sell on this street. I’m thinking to try some, so we stop and ask what some things are, and we find ourselves buying some bbq pork 10,000 kip ($1.25) and one buffalo sausage 5,000 kip (60 cents). Once again, not a huge outlay of cash if we don’t like it. The BBQ was really really tasty, we ate that first…

The buffalo sausage was the consistency of mushy, greasy baby poo inside a chewy casing….my first expression is optimistic, then a split second later, my expression says it all.

I had two bites, which is exactly 1.5 more than I should have, Troy tried one, then we put it back in the bag and tossed it. In hindsight we should have given it to one of the stray dogs that we see roaming everywhere here.

Feeling like we need to bring it down a notch, we stop at the bakery and get our requisite personal cakes that we have grown so fond of (nightly). Tonight I go for the pineapple and Troy has his personal favourite (banana). Still need to try the chocolate, but I’ve enjoyed mango a couple times, and coconut. Recommend all of these highly! We did not dig into these right away, as we like to have them for a night treat when back in the room.

We did however stop by the minimart with the regularly priced ice cream that I came across a couple days ago. Here is my proof…

And a shameless selfie enjoying said ice cream….

After we bought this ice cream we saw another minimart and their cornets were 12,000 kip. So YA, that’s all I’m going to say about that. I’m done whining about the overpriced ice cream, other than we came across the lady we bought the original stuff from today and you should have seen her face when we walked up. Really just walking by, but I think she thought we were walking UP to her. She jumped up and smiled and thought we were back for more. Um…..

So the view down the street really jumped out at me tonight. The flags….not used to seeing so many hammer and sickle flags, the communist symbol. They are prevalent here right alongside the Laos flag.

Found some tasty mystery snacks down the alley from the place we ate “supper”–hoping they are tasty, if not, I’ll just go back to purchasing my trusty banana chips. Who are we kidding, I’ll get more banal chips either way 😉

Some small amount discussion as to what these actually are, I’ll keep you posted when I get into them.

Oh YA, and here is a little toddler playing on the floor while his parents tend the store.

Yes, he is playing a stacking game with butane lighters. I guess it true, a young creative mind can make a toy out of anything. I suppose the fact that there was a small newborn sibling screaming it’s head off made it easier for the parents to just be grateful he was playing quietly and they weren’t gonna question it as long as he was quiet? Yikes.

As I sit here on my patio blogging. I see lightning off in the distance, wonder if this means rain? Overnight rain would be best as we are really hoping to rent bikes tomorrow so we can head off into the countryside. Not to get up close and personal with snakes or anything mom, I’d like to see them catch me 😉😉

This is the question we asked ourselves around 4pm yesterday. I say “No” as in my opinion it only counts as a rainout if we had to alter our plans to accomdate/avoid getting wet. We however were doing exactly what we had planned to do, which was sit on our butts in Utopia until we felt the calling to move our butts to the massage place. We managed to get ourselves up and off the patio by noon and made our way over to Utopia. Our view…

We had settled in and ordered up some “loaded fries” AKA poutine, by 12:30.

The menu touts them as “almost Canadian”. Hahahahahahahaha yes, ok. They had bacon, some onions (TBD whether they were an actual stand alone ingredient or part of the gravy) cheese and of course gravy. Quite tasty if not a little on the cold side (as cold as food gets here) This was due to the fact that one second we are sitting there on the bamboo patio enjoying the view waiting for our fries, and the next second there is a monsoon blowing in and the whole thing got drenched.

Even the Chinese and Koreans took their cells phones and moved 😉

The food could not be walked out to the patio in this situation, so it sat on a counter in the main part of the restaurant until we got the comon sense/courage to dart from the patio to the main structure. So we settled into some very comfy couches inside, enjoyed our poutine and waited for it to blow over.

It came and went, we stayed put and ate our way through the menu and the afternoon. 2 bottles of water, poutine, pizza, spring rolls and a mango chicken sandwich later it was 6:30 and we thought we could muster enough energy to find our massage place. In all fairness we did have a very long conversation with Rob, canadian owner, not of the building, but of the restaurant. It’s complicated to “own” things here as an expat, so he leases the building/land and he owns/runs the restaurant out of it. Ironically, the building owner is also a canadian from, get this, the same town in Canada, London. They did not know each other prior to doing business here. Small world! He shared with us some of the pitfalls of being in business here. Wow it’s a struggle….not sure why he is still here flogging away at it, other than he is financially invested for some number of years at least. Sounds like a gigantic head ache to me…..

I was so engrossed in my food, I forgot to take the requisite photos. Oops! Rob is putting two new pizzas on the menu in the next couple days, so hopefully we will be able to go back (if we can find time in our BUSY schedule) to test them out for him 😇 we will consider it our duty as fellow Canadians to give him our honest opinion.

So to answer the question about whether this counts as a rain out, I definitely vote no, bcz we did exactly what we planned, nothing but chillin’. No change or alteration in the plan, other than moving couches…..the temp dropped a little which was welcome relief, and the humidity was bumped up (which I can do without).

We did indeed find our massage place and requested “head and back” massage knowing full well this means a body massage. Not gonna lie, felt great, but Pretty sure if I hadn’t done my best to tense up my chest cavity at certain times the girl may have crushed my rib cage. I have no idea how they are so freaking strong, they can’t be more than 95pounds soaking wet, but they are like sumo wrestlers when they get someone on the mat. Also pretty sure suffocation is the worst way to go in the end, as that is how close I came to being pillow snuffed. I try to keep my head to the side but she wanted me face down so my neck was straight and she could do her thing. Plus I may or may not have gotten a sunburn on my back a week or so ago in Chiang Mai and now am suffering through the dreaded peel phase. The shirt they put me in would have taken a layer of my skin either way it was so scratchy, but needless to say the back rub speeded up the shedding of my crocodile skin by several days. Seriously though, I felt like a new gal after that, it was as always a great use of 50,000 kip! And my back feels wonderful. The mattress in our room is the usual “firm” that we encounter here in SE Asia, so a back rub (or two) will always fix that right up.

Saw some additional information about sugar this morning. Starting to think I should be eating more refined sugar, with all the health benefits plus the good I would be doing for the environment!😳

Update on the shampoo question. I just HAD to see what was in there. I have no idea what the labeling actually means, this looks like manageable Grey shampoo to me, so maybe I should be using it!

We are starting to feel the squeeze that always comes in the last few days of vacation, the looming presence of reality coming back. I miss my kids and my friends and my bed, but the thought of leaving all this behind is tough…….I did make a new friend here though, named him Bert. Not sure if I can take him with us when we leave….he seems like he would make a good pet.

So we managed to adjust our schedule, move a few things around, perhaps push off something else to make a massage happen yesterday. Hahahaha

There is one massage place on the Main Street of the historic part of town and several on the Mekong River view street, since we prefer a 3 minute walk to a 6 minute walk, we go to the place on Main Street. This is where we had several massages last year…so go with what you know! They have THE most comfortable chairs here, so comfy in fact it prompted Troy to change his mind from a back massage to a foot massage just so he could enjoy the chair. The whole thing was fabulous, 50,000 kip ($6.25 USD). So the thing about getting a foot massage is that it is clear when the halfway point is (as they switch feet) I’m always a teeny tiny bit (ok-a lot) sad when I know it’s over half over. And I might let that disappointment cloud my experience on the second foot. Anyway yesterday, she was kind of wrapping things up on the second foot and I was thinkng jeez that went really fast! Way faster than the first foot. Then Troy looks over and says ” how was your snoozy poozy?” DANG IT! I fell asleep…..I really hate it when that happens…..

On an side note, they sure are promoting the heck out of sugar here. These are not the kind of things we are being told about refined sugar back in north America. 😳

So……have not ridden the E-bus again. It’s actually called the e-bus even though I referred to it multiple times before as an E-car. It’s more like car than a bus in my opinion. It kind of reminds me of Zippy, other than it is electric, it’s not red, it has plastic windows that roll up and it has a Laos driver. None of those things are true for Zippy. But still seems like a car to me…..this is what 90% of the tuk tuks look like here:

This is what the other 9.9999% look like this:

And there are 2 E-busses.

I wanted to update the ice cream situation. So something went awfully horribly wrong there when we bought that ice cream a couple days ago for 70,000 kip. I was sort of kidding when I said I thought the sign had been recycled from Thailand. But I am really really thinking that the sign WAS from Thailand and in baht. It is literally the only explanation. I say this bcz I saw ice cream for sale in a mini mart and it was exactly the same, a cornet cone and a magnum,and the magnum was 16,000 kip and the cornet was 13,000 kip. Now while still a bit pricier than Thailand ice cream, it is way closer to what I would expect. Pretty much everything is about 20-25% more expensive here than in Thailand. We have as yet to really decipher why this is. But that is 29,000 kip vs 70,000 kip. YA, I just don’t know what went wrong, we must have been delirious from sun exposure. That is the worst rake I’ve been subjected to in like–FOREVER

Also wanted to share this product. What does this mean? And can I use it? This wouldn’t fly where I am from……

You should be able to click on the picture to enlarge it to see the fine print but just in case you can not read it, it says “manageable black shampoo”. What if I was blonde?

At 5:58pm last night we realized the time and made a live time decision to run to the top of Mount Phousi. It is the highest point in the city and is known for spectacular sunset views (when the sunset is spectacular of course). We climbed to the top when we were here before and while it was lovely, it was not an over the top sunset night. So we decided we should try again. The sunset was phenomenal the night prior but of course we were down by the night market and not on the top of Mount Phousi. Yes that is pronounced how you think.

It is 328 steps, about 1000 metres I believe, and offers stuning views of the town from all directions as well as the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. Somehow we don’t think that it was as arduous a climb as three years ago, although the amount of sweat wouldn’t necessarily indicate this 😅😅

There are several temples on the way up to stop and admire AKA “catch your breath”

The Sky presunset

Then 20 minutes later….

The one thing about this little excursion is that it is heavily promoted on every travel forum, website, blog, book etc out there as THE thing to do in Luang Prabang, so this means there could be 100+ people vying for the perfect photo opp. Let me assure you no one is up there just to enjoy the view without the requisite camera, phone, selfie stick combo. And my fears come to life as we approach the stair landing and there are no less than 8 tour busses lining the side of the street. Quickly we apply our very much required bug spray, and then I’m saying to my sidekick….RUN…..we have to get there before the tour busses!! YA, I said that, probably loud enough for any English speaking person to hear. “They” are most assuredly stopping at every Buddha along the way to take pictures and admire the view, so we made good time passing folks on the left and got ourselves to the top in what I consider record time and secured an average vantage point. Now Troy had a good point, he said, no worries, a good percentage of these folks will leave as soon as the sun goes behind the mountain, they will think “hm, that’s it, ok, I’m out of here” BUT we happen to know that THAT is not the actual sunset. That occurs 20 minutes later after the sun has gone a good way behind the mountain. Sure enough, 6:45pm and people start to trickle out, we inch over, more trickle out, we move over a metre. HA! Probably 60% of the people are gone by 6:55. And there is a young English speaking couple behind us discussing what to do, should they go? I turn around and say “hang in there! It was at its peak at 7:15pm last night-wait it out” they say, “really-ok”, they wait 10 more minutes and then they leave. SIGH-Ok, that’s not what I was thinking, I meant really wait it out, bcz by 7:15 there was a lovely sunset but they were long gone by then, prolly mostly down the mountain. You know, I just can’t save everyone from themselves. When it was all over and we went down to the market ourselves in search of food, I saw them, haggling over scarves or something, and I almost stopped and shook them! But nah, I carried on, young people…..you just can’t tell them anything.