A peaceful time

We have returned from our four-day adventure in Mong Ngoy. Here is what we did:

-Eat- There were only really three options for food; a breakfast and dinner buffet supplied by a young Swedish fellow and his young wife and very young (6 months) daughter, An indian restaurant, and two riverside bar/restaurants. There was also a roadside (there was only one dirt road) restaurant. We ate at the roadside restaurant once; the food was tasty but we could not get past the amount of pepper used in it which must have been a couple of spoonfuls for each dish. Other than this it was mainly combinations of buffet and Indian. The buffet was all you can eat and it was hard to justify not eating as much as possible, especially because the other restaurants charged almost as much or more for a simple meal.

-Sleep- We stayed at a riverside bungalow with a bed, table, two chairs, and two hammocks. The bathroom did not have a sink but only three faucets. One to shower, one to rinse, and one to refill the toilet flushing water. Very basic but it had everything we needed.

-Read- I brought only one book on our trip, The Great Gatsby, and I lost it on the first day. Luckily through book stores and book exchanges I have been able to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Cider House Rules, and now Hard Times by Charles Dickens (which I am thoroughly enjoying). I think Ashley has read more than I have even but I can't name her books. Most of our days we could be found swinging in our hammocks enjoying a good read.

-Walk- We mainly ambled around town and to food and back but we did take a day to walk up the road to some smaller villages. We walked through the tiered, dry rice patty fields and chatted of past and future this and that. We did not even realize until after that we had spent around five hours that way.

-Enjoy- If we were not reading in our hammocks we were to be found playing cribbage or rummy, listening to music, or just listening to the cacophony of insect, lizard, amphibian, and bird sounds. I even broke out the harmonica I said I would try to learn and played a bit. The town had power from 6:30-9:30 every evening and we mostly were asleep before the power was off. It was good to go to bed early because it was impossible to sleep past 6 due to the rooster intent on waking the world.

It seems to be a theme for us at this point in our travels to just "be" and Mong Ngoy provided just the right mixture for us to do precisely this.