I had booked an extra day in Luang Prabang because I wanted to take a cooking class at the Tamarind Cooking School, but as mentioned before, I was going to have to change hotels.

As I was walking down to where the monks did their thing, an army of mini-buses were streaming down that way too. Ugh. It really did feel like a tourist circus rather than something meaningful. I guess they have had all sorts of problems with bad behavior, vendors turning it into a sales racket, and just general loss of meaning. Across the street as I was walking, I saw six monks walking along the street and getting some alms from actual Laotian people. That was cool and seemed way more authentic.

I hung about for a while in the solitude of the morning, but then a bunch of people started streaming up. My peace and quiet on my bench was disrupted, so I decided to head back down. I came down the main pathway and it became clear that you were supposed to pay if you went that way. I guess I went up the secret monk entrance up the back side.

There were monks everywhere having finished up the circus downtown and returning to their respective temples. I saw three young monks at one temple that were doing their chores and sweeping the walkway. One of them looked like he was playing air guitar—probably “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin. Their music can transcend any culture. Who doesn’t want to just get knocked over by rock ‘n roll once in a while?

I got back to my room and started packing up my bike and other stuff. I thought I would just pay and check two bags so I didn’t have schlep the stuff through so many airports. I had a knock on my door and it was Gerald, asking whether I wanted to go do something before I checked out. “Sure!”

We headed over to the Royal Palace and Museum. I didn’t have a huge amount of time, but that seemed like a good thing to investigate. Turns out we were not alone. Clearly it is on the “must do list” for all the tourists. It was chocker blocked.

We tried to go into the Royal Palace and got stopped. No cameras and no shorts. I got stopped with the camera and Gerald with the shorts. They directed us to locker room where I could lock up my camera and Gerald was given a sarong. Back we went. It was so crowded it was a bit tough to enjoy. I would rate it as “ok.” A lot of the displays just weren’t all that great.

I needed to get to the Tamarind Restaurant by 4:15 pm for my cooking class. It was about a 2 km walk there, so I decided to head out a bit early, take some pictures and maybe find a place to have a coffee or something. It was seriously hot and humid (31 degrees and a billion percent humidity), so I walked at a snail’s pace.

Just across the river there was a complex that had several temples and a living area for the monks. It was pretty cool, but the lighting was terrible. I walked around checking it out. Evidently there are at least 33 Buddhist temples in Luang Prabang, probably more; it is these temples that make it a Unesco World Heritage site.

I headed down toward the restaurant looking for a good place to stop, get out of the heat, and have a drink of some kind. I was focused on a coffee shop, but just happened to walk by a wine store. It looked brand new and had great AC inside.

I headed down to the restaurant and still got there early. The served me some tea and I sat at a table waiting for the class. There were 6 of us in the class: an American couple, a British couple, a French woman, and me. I was definitely the old fart of the group.

We found out that the cooking school is nowhere near the restaurant. We piled into the back of a truck and it drove out of town, down a rough dirt road and eventually came to the place where the school was.

We were scheduled to make 4 dishes: 3 mains and 1 desert. Like so many cooking classes though, there was a fair amount of it already prepped for us. I am not sure if I could ever reproduce some of these recipes in New Zealand because of that, but I will give it a go when I get back!

We were preparing:

• Eggplant Dip (Jeow Mak Keua)
• Lao Tomato Salsa (Jeow Mak Len)
• Fish Steamed in Banana Leaves (Mok Pa)
• Stuffed Lemongrass (Oua Si Khai)
• Purple Sticky Rice with Coconut Sauce (Khao Gam)

A key staple in Lao food is sticky rice. It requires soaking from 5 to 24 hrs, then steaming in a bamboo basket. It is then flipped and steamed some more to get the heavy, sticky texture.

The first thing we made was the Lao eggplant and tomato salsa. We roasted the ingredients on a cool little stone oven and used a big wooden mortar and pestle to mash it all up.

Next up was the fish steamed in banana leaves. The first step was to make the sauce in the mortar and pestle, then you prepped the banana leaves. What I learned was that to get the leaves to be flexible, you roast the whiter side of the leaves on the fire. This allows you to fold up the leaves without breaking them. Next you mixed the fish in with the sauce and placed inside the banana leaves and tied it into a nice packet secured with bamboo strands. Mine, shall we say, could use a bit of improvement. The fish then steamed for 25 minutes or so.

The one I was most curious about was the stuffed lemongrass with chicken. I could not envision how this was done, but in the end I learned a super cool technique. In many ways, it was pretty simple. You took a knife and cut the lemon grass stock about 2″ up from the bottom on up about 4″ or so. You kept doing this until you have a number of fine strands that you could make into a basket. You then created a chicken mush of spices and stuffed it in the basket. These then went into the deep frier.

The final dish was the purple sticky rice desert. I will say this was not much cooking on this dish as the tamarind sauce and rice were already made. We did have to make our own coconut milk that we then added it to the rice and boiled.

After finishing the cooking we sat down and had a big feast. The chef also made a few other dishes for us to try. I will say the bamboo soup was weird and I did not like it, but other than that it was all amazing.

It was a fun evening and it was some nice company to hang out with even if I was the total old fart of the group.

I made it back to the hotel and realized I was exhausted. It seemed like a million years ago that I had been in Hanoi doing photography with Son. It was definitely time to go home and nest for a while, my brain was full. Unfortunately, I had another full day in Luang Prabang as my flight didn’t leave until 7:30 pm the next day.

The trip back was going to be grueling and involved, 4 countries, 4 flights, 2 overnights, and 6 trips through immigration, all while dragging my bike around. The problem arose because there are really only 3 places you can fly to from Luang Prabang: Hanoi, Bangkok, and some place in China. China was out and Bangkok had a terrible flight schedule to New Zealand. So Hanoi it was. The good news is that Vietnam Airways had a flight to Melbourne with a 17 hour layover in Hanoi. This allowed me to check my bike all the way through Melbourne. Still, it was a complicated plan.

I got up in the morning and felt like I should probably go do something that day, but I just couldn’t find the motivation. It was super hot, so the thought of walking around town did not appeal and I was kind of done with photography for the trip. Finally, I just decided I would hang out by the pool and chill.

It was a relaxing but dull day.

I had tried to check a second bag onIine, but it wouldn’t let me for some reason. When I got to the airport they told me I had to pay $240 since I didn’t pre-pay. Ugh. So I took it as carry-on. I would have packed differently if I had known; now I had to carry a super heavy duffle bag through all those airports.

I arrived in Hanoi at 9:30 pm and went the hotel that was just a few kilometers from the airport. By the time I got there is it was 11 pm. It was a super fancy room, but sadly I had to get up at 6:00 am to get back to the airport so didn’t get to enjoy it much.

In the morning, it was back through immigration and waiting for my flight. I had paid for a bulkhead seat, but that is not the seat that I ended up getting. Ugh. The only good thing was that there was no one in the middle seat, so I didn’t make a fuss.

The plane was super hot and stuffy, so it made the 10 hours to Melbourne go on forever. We landed around 10:30 pm and I prayed my bike made it. Thankfully it did and I buzzed right through immigration. As I was exiting immigration, just before going through the doors, some dude decides he is going to make a phone call right there and stops abruptly right in front of me. There is no room to get by and my bike goes flying off my cart. I was not amused and I was so tired that my patience with clueless people was nonexistent. I yelled at him “What are you doing!!???!! Exit the door, then make your call!” He had a terrified look on his face, and he and his girlfriend scrambled to help me get my bike back on the cart. Ugh, sadly not my best moment.

I will say the biggest pain with traveling with a bike box is that there is no good way to load it on the cart. You can put it sideways, but then there are a thousand choke points that you can’t get through, not to mention all the people walking around staring at their phones not paying attention. You can put it lengthwise, but it won’t balance and stay on the cart. Or you can stand it on end, which is by far the most stable and will fit through tight spaces, but then you can’t see where you’re going.

After yelling at the dude and then feeling bad about it, I got the shuttle to the airport hotel and managed to get sorted and in bed by about midnight. Again, I had to get up a 6:00 am and head back to the airport and back through immigration … my 5th time already on the trip. I was exhausted and still had another full day of flying.

We headed off to Christchurch and got there around 2 pm. Immigration was backed up and it took a while to get through, plus I was going to have to declare my bike. It was a pretty tight connection for my flight to Nelson, but I really wanted to make it home that night.

I stood at the oversized baggage counter and waited … and waited … and waited. No bike. I asked the lady that was working there if all the bags had been unloaded and she said yes. Ugh. I went to baggage services and she started the paperwork. Tick tock, tick tock. Then she said we had to go back to immigration. We did. We chatted and I asked if I could get a green card now that I didn’t have anything to declare. He said yes. Yeah! Maybe I was going to make my flight after all.

But then the baggage lady said we had to get in another line and talk to another immigration dude. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why. The line was huge and barely moving. Ugh. I nearly lost it. I asked her “Can’t I get some priority to jump the queue since you lost my bag!???” At first she said “no,” but then I think she saw the look of desperation on my face and said she would try.

Success. I was able to jump the queue. Sadly, I now had to sprint over to the domestic check in and try to get on the flight which was leaving in 30 minutes. Ugh. I tried to recheck my bag and it rejected it. Too close to the flight. I lost it again and begged. They said I would have to get a later flight. I begged and pleaded some more. Finally they said they would put it on as a late bag. I sprinted to gate just as they started boarding. Whew, I was going to make it home.

To be honest, I didn’t even really care that they lost my bike, I just wanted to be home and in my own bed. I figured I would sort the bike out later. We landed in Nelson and I gave a big sigh of relief. It was an exhausting 3 days getting back. Asia seems close on the map, but it isn’t. It both hard to get to due to distance (about 1/4 of the world away), and the logistical complications created by living in a small town in a small country. I might try to do it differently next time, but I am not sure there is an easier way. They all involve some level of suffering.

But I was home with my partner of four decades, sitting in my chair with a glass of wine and happy that I had completed such an amazing trip with only the most minor of issues … although I still feel bad about traumatizing the dude in the Melbourne Airport. He probably has a blog and is writing about me.

I’ll write one more post summarizing my trip and some of the many thoughts I had along the way.

But I’m home now.