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At another vendor who was selling a wide variety of dishes on the other side of the street, we spotted one of the local specialties, banana flower salad. Banana flowers grow off the end of a bunch of bananas. They are large and tapered, and have a beautiful deep reddish-purple hue on the outside. To prepare them, you peel off the outside layer to expose the light green, almost white inner leaves that have a texture like endive. In this case, the leaves had been cut into small slivers, and mixed with onion, shredded coconut and coconut milk, and cilantro. The banana flower as a very slight astringency, similar to that of an artichoke, which gave the beige mixture an accent on top of the other mild ingredients.

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In a bowl close to the banana flower dish we spied a smooth, dark green concoction. On menus around Luang Prabang we had seen river weed offered up in many forms. Here we found it pureed in a bowl, so of course we had to try it. Culled from the shallows of the Mekong, riverweed is a favorite snack of the water buffalo. After sampling a bit of this smooth mixture with some sticky rice, we unanimously decided that it's best left to the buffalo, as it has very little taste, save for the added salt. However, always keeping an open mind, we tried the green weed in a different form - dried in sheets like nori, with toasted sesame seeds on top. While this offered a bit more potential, our verdict was the same.

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We continued our meandering. Mary, ever under the spell of her sweet tooth, spied a woman selling some sort of sweet looking dumpling just a few yards down the street. Upon closer inspection, these turned out to be glutinous rice and coconut milk dumplings cooked over an open fire in a cast iron mold. They were lightly sweet, not obscuring the coconut undertone, with a crispy exterior. The glutinous rice gave a bit of springiness to the texture. The cook had laid out the freshly cooked morsels on a banana leaf, contrasting their milky white color nicely against the deep jungle green. Still hot, they almost slid down your throat without chewing. We only had a taste, but I later had to return to get a bag of six more. It is important to be thorough.

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At several places along the street there were vendors who offered up tasty looking satays, grilled meats, and grilled fish. One of the specialties of this part of Laos is a small pork sausage that is sweet, while maintaining a tantalizing savory undertone. Retracing our steps to the top of the street where I had seen an especially promising looking vendor, I pointed my finger to the sausages on the grill and made the universal sign for "one." I was still having a bit of trouble with numbers in Lao. My sizzling hot sausage was delivered to me in the way that many street foods are in Asia - on a stick.

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At this point we had diverged from any sort of original plan, and were wandering casually around the market seeking more things to try. Further down the road, next to the dried riverweed, we tried a shrimp cake - made of whole small river shrimp and deep-fried. River shrimp are a common cooking ingredient in Southeast Asia. You'll find them added to dishes like spicy green papaya salad and pad thai. They are very mild in taste, since they are dried for long periods of time, and usually add more to dishes in the way of texture. They tend to be a bit chewy.

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It was starting to get dark, and there was still more to try. Several meat stalls along the street were offering plates of what looked like beef jerky, arranged with various other meat offerings. Upon closer inspection, we found out it was barbecued water buffalo. Of course, we couldn't let that go untested. It's very chewy, and pretty rich. The sauce was a tomato-based sauce with vinegar and chili. Hitting the trails for a wilderness trek? Better take some of this with you.

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Of course, at any point you can stop at a number of vendors for a fantastic variety of fresh fruit - watermelon, mango, pineapple, papaya, Asian pears, oranges, and sometimes sugar cane. If you get thirsty, you need simply find a vendor selling plump young coconuts. Before your eyes, they will take the large, light green orbs, and with the precision of a surgeon wielding a machete, hack off a section of the top large enough to slip a straw into. Once drained of the light, sweet milk, they will deftly split the coconut in two, allowing you to scoop out the gelatinous flesh inside.

Darkness descended upon us as we finally reached the far end of the block towards the river. What little light was left showed the vendors starting to thin out. We had pretty much tried everything that looked interesting to us, with varying degrees of success. We wandered along the river in search of a place to have a drink on the high bluff overlooking the Mekong River. It was only a couple of days before Pi Mai, the Buddhist New Year celebration, and families were gathering together to celebrate, build floats, and just converse. That evening, we sipped our Beer Lao and digested our adventure.