Mood: Erm... er... WOW!
Music: Mumford and sons
Today I had a nice lie in. I woke in plenty of time to potter around my room for a while, reading and listening to music, and then to wonder down to the riverside and photograph the waterfall on the river's edge before finishing off my present shopping and going to get some food.
I went back to the place I ate at last night but this time asked for it to be spicey! The dish I got was a sizzling beef platter with lots of chili, ginger and garlic. It was rather delicious!
This afternoon I went for a bike ride around a couple of the local villages. The paddy fields were being flooded but and everything was very green, but most fo the photo opportunities were spoiled by overhead powerlines cutting right through some really nice scenic views of the huge steep pillars of limstone rock jutting haphazardly out of the flat soil. Most of the journey was spend on little side roads but we were constantly being passed by huge coaches and the like.
On joining the mains roads again we got back into the chaos that I've become used to seeing. Layers of bikes, e-bikes, scooters and cars overtaking each other, ringing bells and honking horns on their way at anything they think might pull out to overtake something in front of them. It gets more complicated when people start to ride the wrong way up the cycle lanes that are on both sides of the road. Especially confusing to me was the woman on a tricycle taking a water buffalo the wrong way up the cycle path...
Once back in town we stopped and sat in a cafe for a while to have a cold drink. It was massively humid out and probably not far below 30C so a drink was most definitely required. I also had some vegetable spring rolls from the cafe. These turned out to be wrapped in a thin layer of omelet, which was interesting but worked quite well.
This evening I went to the Impressions show, by Sanje Lin. He was the guy who went on to arrange and direct the Olympic games opening ceremony. This show has been running since 2004 and is a major attraction of the area. The stands hold up to 3000 people per show and the show itself has a huge area of water as its stage, set on the backdrop of mountains lit up in the distance. There are over 600 people involved in the production, including large numbers of local farmers who paddle nearly 100 bamboo rafts around at various points in the show.
I can see how people could see and think... so what. There was no real story or theme that could be understood but it was, as far as I saw, an amazing spectacle of light and sound, set in one of the most magnificent backdrops the planet has to offer.
I decided against the little electric car back to town in favour of walking. This gave me a couple of opportunities to take some low light photos of the mountains lit up along the way.
Tomorrow I have another late start and an afternoon flight to Hong Kong, my last stop before I'm home.
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