It emerges that my fellow tubers from yesterday carried on drinking into the night. Jen won a T-shirt just because she was the highest placed female in the killer pool competition at the Aussie Bar, but she also has a crate of beer having won the competition outright.
Today is a drive day towards the Vietnam border over the surprisingly smooth roads through the Laos jungle. The towns we drive through have a mix of wood hut houses, but also some attractive looking modern homes. Not all of those built with concrete are painted though.
I also note that there are a lot of 4x4’s on the road. The Lonely Planet mentions that Laos is getting a lot of investment from China, although ‘mainly to benefit Chinese companies’, e.g. the Chinese road builders we encountered on our first day in Laos. This is probably a reflection of the writer’s (mis)understanding of market economics as much as anything, although China is notorious for making investment conditional on Chinese companies receiving the benefit of the expenditure.
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