We ease into activity with local walks around the town, to the stupa, monastery and through rubber plantations. At the stupa we meet these lovely girls who don't speak much English but the one on the right cannot stop hugging me! We're talking full arms around my waist, hanging on, really adorable childlike clinging hugs. It's so sweet but we just finished hiking, I cannot imagine that my soaking wet with sweat shirt is something pleasant to cling to. Oh the power of love!

It's so cool to see the rubber trees actually producing rubber! We saw the empty bowls on our very first hike to a waterfall in Bang Niang, Thailand in January. And now look at the little bowls all full of bright white rubber. It looks like ricotta cheese... mmm so many cheese cravings over here in Southeast Asia, but I digress. 

Ahead we see a family of three pulled over, soaked to the bone and shivering. We pull over to try to help and charades that they are out of gas and we can siphon some of ours to get them out of the rain. We go to grab our keys to unlock the seat for our gas tank and the keys are not there............ Umm, what? How is it possible that we are riding our bike without keys in the ignition?! Now we're in trouble in the rain as well; worst helpers ever. They recognize we're in trouble too but they give us money to bring them gasoline. Luckily their key works to start up our bike and we head back the direction we came ever so slowly, searching for our lost keys on the wet pavement. Low and behold, we come up to our poncho spot some two miles back and our keys are right there!! Yahoo!! From now on, we start the bike, remove the key (because apparently we can do that and still drive) and put the key into Ryan's zipper pocket. We buy gas from our pineapple ladies and deliver it to the family. By now the rain has passed, they're wringing out their clothes and all is well. It's a truly beautiful ride. 

Found some Lennon glasses!

Muang Sing is an agricultural hub for Laos being so close to the Chinese border. We explore hill after hill of banana trees, cassava roots, rubber trees, rice and watermelon. 

We watch girls playing a game that involves a stretchy string held high between two of them. A third girl comes and tries to jump up, catch the string on her foot to push it to the ground while she spins over it. It's impressive stuff. Here we find the remedy to the typical Laos breakfast of boring noodle soup, that's almost like Vietnamese Pho minus all flavor: pork rinds. These crispy salty "croutons" just made breakfast so much better. But Muang Sing has the best noodle soups in all of Laos regardless. We head back to NamTha and get ready for our trek into Nam Ha.