where life moves slowly in a good way

one of the most stunning sunsets i have ever seen was watching the sun set behind the mekong river, sitting on the top of a hill in luang prabang, in northern laos. life is laos moves at a slow and leisurely pace compared to other south east asian countries, you truly cannot help but feel relaxed there and just happy to be. what a wonderful place it would be to live.

accidental zen

i am not a believer in god(s) but sometimes i have a sense of greater powers or forces at work in the world. maybe it is just the magical concept of fate or meaningful coincidence. when i returned home from a trip to vietnam and was looking through the many many photos i took there for the first time on a screen bigger than the tiny one on the back of my digital camera, this was one which instantly became one of my favourites of the trip, it encapsulated so perfectly what the whole vietnam experience had come to mean to me. because the truth of this photo is that it was not carefully taken at all - but rather very carelessly out of the window of a taxi racing through the busy streets of saigon as i tried to capture the image of the clouds - only to truly accidentally and unknowingly, yet with perfect partnership, catch the word 'zen' in the same frame.