The fun continues! Birthday Part 3: the "waterfall"

Ever since my first week at my host family, I had been told we would be going to the waterfall "this weekend." The trip was delayed for about three weeks due to some sickness in the family, rain, etc. On Sunday Sept 26th, the 8 passenger family van finally pulled out, loaded down with picnic food/supplies...and 12 people!

We arrived around 11am. There was no one there. As I found out later, everyone starts coming around 1pm. I guess we were just the early birds.
It did allow us to get a good picnic spot right near the river, though! If you can see from this picture, the park we went to had a bunch of these little picnic shelters with a concrete slab and a tin roof. We spread out our woven mats and had a fabulous picnic! We had...BBQ duck, sticky rice, spicy green papaya salad, bamboo soup, and fried maggots...a classic picnic really =)




Now, I dont know about you, but when I heard "waterfall," i was expecting...well, a waterfall. Instead, it ended up being a river with a few little tiny baby rapids.
This picture is from when we first arrived (hence, no one in the water). The river proved to be perfect for some mild tubing and just general splashing around! At one point we even laid down in a shallow area and just let the river rush by around us. There is nothing better than playing in a river on a hot day!!






When you did go floating down in the intertubes, you floated through this "jungle book" area, as I thought of it.
There were hanging vines four inches in diameter that you could swing on Tarzan-style and then splash into the river. It was a blast!

What none of these pictures could really capture was just how CROWDED it got by the middle of the afternoon! There were hundreds and hundreds of people along this quarter-mile or less stretch of river, both in the picnic shelters and in the river. It was insane!...and a really fun end to a great Lao birthday weekend.