Waterfalls all around Luang Prabang!

Luang Prabang is such a nice town. My first day traveling around here I have to say has been the most quintesential "lao travel" day. I don't know why, but it was just everything that I hoped traveling around here would be like! I rented mountain bikes with a couple of Canadian guys (one of which is matt gauthier, how funny is that?) and we headed out of town to where we heard there was a waterfall. We found it not too far away down some dirt roads. It was a nice waterfall, but somewhat small, so instead of stopping to swim there we asked where there was another one... a women at the place drew a map in the dirt to where we thought we wanted to go... so we took some back roads which were quite muddy to get back onto some sort of main road. these roads really reminded me of roads home in VT, except they are not even quite as wide. on the way we stopped and a bunch of kids came out to say hi. they were so friendly and had big smiles you couldn't help but smile! we took pictures together and they love to see them on the back of the camera. all in all it was probably a 15-20 km ride when we got to a big sign for the the tat sae waterfall. we rode a bit longer to get to the river where you take a boat up to the falls. this waterfall wasn't really high, but one of the most unique waterfalls i have ever seen. it was still very powerful, being the rainy season and all, and there was just tons of water cascading down through the forest... it was really amazing!! a friend took some pics with a waterproof camera that i'll post when i get... what was nice was that we could jump in some areas and climb up the waterfall. there was even a big group of monks there swimming with us!

then for some reason we had to get out, i think it had to do with the boat. so we left and had a long uphill ride back... which was still okay, minus the gears not working on my bike. people were looking at us like we were crazy, because we were covered from head to toe in mud. the guys even had to get hosed down outside of their guest house before they let them enter... luckily i snuck into my guest house and got a hot shower right away.

all in all it was really a great day! some biking, swimming, waterfalls, what more can you ask for?
yesterday since the guys didn't want to get back on the bikes we took a sawngthaew to what the tuk tuk drivers around here call "big waterfall". now i know why, it was absolutely huge!! this is what you would call a stunning waterfall, you can hear it from far away... water was everywhere, misting far off of the waterfall. you could barely even see where the top of it starts!
this was at a nicely maintained park and you could hike up the sides of the waterfall, but water is even flowing there too! at one point i got to a very cool long staircase that just ended...
sun peaking through the canopy on the hike
on the walk out i stopped to look for a tiger that is caged there, it was rescued from poachers. i was really hoping to see it, but didn't. i did get to see about ten bears that were also confiscated from poachers housed there as well.
i also was taking some other nice pictures, just because i had time to play with some of the settings on my camera. that place was just about as pretty as it gets. but it was somewhat hard to get a good picture of the waterfall without getting wet!
at the end of the day it starting raining somewhat hard... a lot of us huddled under a tree through the worst of it. i don't think i could understand just about anyone else in the crowd, there were people there from all over the world, and i thought how funny is this! but as cros, stills and nash would say, a smile is the same in every language - and everyone was smiling

we stopped for some food on the way home... fish anyone?