After the nightmare mini van journey we were both a little spaced out to say the least. We got up fairly late and managed to make it over to breakfast just in time. We had booked ourselves into the number one hotel in Vang Vieng because, since we had ruled it out as way too expensive, it had halved in price and was offering 2 nights get 1 free!! We couldn't believe our luck :-)! Even better we got upgraded to a better room when we arrived as they weren't full. It seems that out of season is the time to come to Asia as you reap the discount and upgrade benefits.

The room was lovely and had a small balcony overlooking a pool area and the restaurant. Views of the mountains from the pool were simply breathtaking and the perfect backdrop for a few cocktails ;-)!!

Esben wasn't feeling too great the first day so he went and sat by the pool while I had another aggressive traditional Lao massage (much more violent than the first and put me off!) before joining him for an afternoon of snoozing and sunbathing.

The next day we hired another scooter and headed off to a large waterfall and a place they call the 'Blue Lagoon' for a swim. The roads were very very bumpy so it was a new challenge in our scooter riding adventure! The scenery was spectacular with jagged forested mountains and bright green paddy fields all around us. The lagoon unfortunately wasn't that blue as it had rained a lot recently but they had built platforms and put ropes up so you could swing and jump into the water. We had great fun watching people plunge into the river and cool off. The afternoon was again spent sipping a cocktail by the pool catching up on some rest and recovery.

Saturday it was time to make our way to Vietienne for our evening flight. Because it had taken us ... 12 hours ... to get from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng we weren't taking any chances on timings and took the 9am bus for the 4 hour journey even though our flight was at 8pm. Obviously this bus arrived on time :-)! It was boiling again so we went to a hotel I had researched where you could pay a bit to use the pool.

This was our third afternoon by the pool and we were both starting to get a bit restless however we were glad we hadn't gone straight to the airport when we arrived later that day as it consisted of only a few plastic chairs. That night we took off on time although I could see fork lightning all around us so was pretty terrified, once again, that we would crash and die (I seem to have developed an irrational fear of flying). Thankfully we didn't crash and arrived safely back in Hanoi.

We spent another day in Hanoi organising our Halong bay tour before getting on the sleeper train for our adventure to Sapa. We are here now and I will blog about it soon.

Alice
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