Mekong Delta and our home stay in a remote village

Today we left Luang Prabang and took a slow boat for 9 hours to our home stay in a village in the middle of the Mekong Delta!

The boat ride was full of beautiful views of the delta. We also saw a lot of mountain goats and buffaloes.

To be honest the ride was a little too long, I slept for about 6 hours and played cards the other 3!

Playing cards with our local guides:

This is the view from one of the beds

At about 5 pm we arrived to the village where we were spending the night! 

We went back to basics! Very simple living! 

The village has around 65 families, a bunch of kids, dogs, and pigs.

They have a tiny primary school where they mix two classes together. Our local guide explained that The school is sponsored by a private company but still lacks teachers and materials.

Here are Lukas and Matt playing volleyball with the locals:

We went for a tour of the village and the women showed us how they get the husk off the rice grain. Here is Waffle putting his strength into practice:

The guide shared with us that the village does not have electricity but do get solar power. A funny thing is that they get satellite so they can watch tv!!! The best channels are from Thailand and apparently that's how the kids learn to speak Thai.

Becca giving kids some fruit

The kids love selfies and looking at themselves in the little screen

At night after dinner the kids came to visit us and we played different games.

Lukas taught the kids clapping games! I sang and taught everybody how to dance the Macarena. 

In addition, we played a couple of rounds of "what's the time Mr. Wolf?" And "star, star, looking" and taught them songs like "head, shoulder, knees,and toes", "hokey pokey", "twinkle twinkle little star" and the "itsy bitsy spider". It was so much fun and the kids really enjoyed interacting with us! They even sang us a school song! It was super sweet!

Blurry picture of Lukas and Haley playing "Star star looking" with the kids

At about 8pm we all had to go to bed!

Haley, Tiffany, Sophia, and I shared a bedroom at the main house and the others were spread into 2 other rooms around the village. Since they have no running water we had to squat and pee into a hole and then put a bucket or two of water for everything to go down into the ground... Lovely! The funniest part about the bathroom is that in the middle of the night they put a padlock on it so people couldn't access it... Leaving us with no option but to go in the wild!!!

At 5:45am we had to go back on the boat to make sure we made it in Thailand by 7pm when they close the border!

We spent the next 11 hours stuck on the boat taking naps, playing card games, and writing in our journals/blogs.