It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole month that we’ve been back in Laos after our last trip to Chiang Rai.
This month our lives have pretty much been all about building our pizza oven, and we’ve kept a detailed account of the daily process on our Forest Retreat Laos website.
During the entire process we’ve had perfect people arrive at the perfect time to help us, as well as learning lots of news skills ourselves along the way. It’s been so much fun to do! Ella and Grant, Mark and Sarah, Gra and Rinat have been great friends to us and we will always remember the help they gave us here. We hope to be able to return the favour to them in future.
We also spent quite a few afternoons out in the rice paddies, watching many sunsets, and generally enjoying life.
Our friends Anic and Manylin had their baby boy by caesarean which was really interesting for us to hear about. It seems that the doctors made a mistake with Manylins due date and because the baby was breach had to do a caesarean. They told her they couldn’t perform the caesarean until she went into labour….. and then at our insistence Anic made the doctors proceed. When the baby came out they realised her placenta had already been used up and the baby wouldn’t have survived much longer if they hadn’t taken it out. They ended up in hospital for a couple of weeks and the baby on a drip, luckily though all went well and they are now home as a family and the baby is doing well. They also told Manlyin that her diet had to consist of only rice, and a small amount of meant, and hot water. She couldn’t eat any fruit or vegetables until she finished breastfeeding. We also cleared this up and thankfully the American doctor Leila who lives in Muang Sing came to visit them and verified our wild ‘theory’ that Manylin really should be eating fruit and vegetables in her diet.
We also celebrated our chef Toc’s birthday, which mean typical Lao style drinking and music so loud your ears almost bleed.
Other than that we have pretty much just been doing the pizza oven, training new staff in preparation for high season, and enjoying the thousands of insects that we’ve found because they’ve come out for rainy season. This year rainy season so far has been great – we’ve had the cool animals and only about half an hour of rain every day, with many days of no rain at all and only a few with more than that.
Our photos are here:
