Andrej and Karen Brummer

The adventures of the Brummers

Tag Archives: Forest Retreat Laos

Paul and Nedsy visit us

Our good friends from Sydney Nerida and Paul arrived from Luang Prabang and after showing them their room and the shop, as well as heaps talking to catch up, we went to Thong and Paet’s for dinner to introduce them to real Lao food.

We spent a day biking around Luang Namtha, visiting the Nam De waterfall (which has much more water now after all the rain) and driving through the rice fields and seeing the temples.

The following day we went up to Muang Sing again, and although we weren’t quite as lucky with the weather as we have been in previous times, it was still awesome; we saw the usual groups of kids and handed out pens and pencils, admired the forest in the national protected area and the rice fields, visited a waterfall we haven’t been to before on the way there, and went to our favourite restaurants.

We also visited a village that we think hadn’t seen westerners before, they were quite curious about us but were very shy and not too sure about us. We gave them some fruit which they accepted and offered some pencils which we think they didn’t know what to do with so they didn’t take them. The sky was getting pretty black so we decided to try to beat the rain and get back to Muang Sing town.

The next day we left before 7am to go to the opening party of Forest Retreat’s new confluence camp, where the Nam Ha and Nam Tha rivers meet. We were intending to stay the night in the jungle there, but in the late afternoon Nedsy got sick, so the 4 of us joined the next boat back to town and returned to the comfort of our hotel for her to recover.

It seemed like we Paul and Nedsy were only here for seconds, we spent so much time riding around and seeing the beauty of the area that we didn’t really get time to chill out as well, but we still had an awesome time. We miss our friends so much so it was really nice to have them here for a few days. Our photos of the few days are here.

Shop Life

Life outside the shop hasn’t really existed too much in the past week or two. We have achieved so much in the shop such as getting new shelves put up, varnishing them, finishing the kitchen benches and getting all appliances set up, painting the toilet floor and door, cleaning upstairs so we have a nice lounge and work area (for now, before we open it to customers), getting our new signs made and putting more information on the website.  We also got given our first pet, a Rhinocerous beetle, which we kept for about a week, got it a friend, but then they were so smelly that we let them go into the wild again.  (Who knew beetles could smell so bad?)

We have managed to get a cleaner, someone to work in the bar, and hopefully someone to cook for us. We have been advertising around town for more staff and hopefully soon we can find more people who have some English to come and work with us.

We are super excited about our friends from Australia coming to visit, Paul and Nerida arrive tonight so we will have a few days off and show them around the area. A few photos of the shop progress are here.