IN & ONwards: Christmas in Luang Prabang

We knew that four of our friends were traveling in the Region (i.e. South East Asia), so we looked for a nice place somewhere in the middle to meet for Christmas: we picked Luang Prabang in Laos.
Luang Prabang is a very well preserved colonial little town on the side of the Mekong.

Just as we arrived in town, we were approached by a local who offered us 2 nights in a fancy hotel for 12 USD instead of 40 USD, so we treated ourselves in the best room we had in the whole trip.
In town, you can see quite a lot of remains from the French colonial time, like "la Poste"...

The center is obviously super touristy, so we decided to rent bikes, and as soon as you're directly out of town, the place is more laid back and authentic. We arrived at a nice temple which was closed. But the monks living just next to it started the conversation and kindly showed us around.

On our first evening here, we went up a hill temple to observe the town and the valley from above.

Luang Prabang and the valley seen from a hill temple

Evening over Luang Prabang and the Mekong River

Sunset seen from the hill temple

So we did meet Eric, Matthias, Ceci and Nacho on the 24th ready to celebrate a special Christmas away from home. We picked one of the nicest places in town in a bamboo garden on the side of the river. We met at 6pm already to have plenty of time for the dinner since the town has a curfew: no one allowed in the streets after midnight....

Here we are on Christmas eve in our bamboo garden, enjoying local BBQ

Here we are busy around the BBQ with all the fresh ingredients.

We met again on Christmas day, at 7am to go for an outdoor day. Here we are for breakfast in the fresh morning before sunrise.

So for this Christmas we picked a 3 hour hike through nice indigenous villages followed by a swim in waterfalls and then Kayaking.

The day started quite fresh and cloudy, but it turned out to be a beautiful day with 25°C

The landscape was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

As usual in Lao, even in the most remote village, locals play petanque!

Several views of the local life. The only ones who seem to be working are the kids below 10 years.... The oldest kids play petanque, and the adults just sit around... Interesting life philosophy...

Fresh waterfall, perfect for a swim!

Departing for the Kayak tour

This picture below was taken about 5 min before we had a little "incident".We weren't paying attention to the current (in fact, there didn't seem to be any current), and the next thing we knew, we just hit a trunk in the waterand our kayak just flipped, and in a second we were both in the water fighting to try to get back on... Nothing happened really, but we got really wet and as the sun was going down, we were starting to get really cold!

After we reached our destination, everyone was freezing cold, and our bus didnt seem to be arriving, so we walked to the next village, and gathered around some locals' cooking fire! The nicest time of the day!