My first night bus to Luang Prabang! We arrived at the bus station to catch the 6.30pm overnight VIP bus to Luang Prabang. As it's an overnight bus, the seats are like bunks beds. We were allocated seats on the lower level - this ment we didn't have much of a window view. They provide you with a blanket,water and a sick bag! The bus took around 12/13 hours. It was a very bumpy journey and the bus broke down a few times! As we slept most of the way, the journey seemed quite quick. We had a few stop off on the side if the road and if you needed the loo, you would just have to squat at the side of the road!

After a couple of hours of broken sleep we arrived at Luang Prabang. It was still dark as it was about 6.30/7am, and we were hounded by tuk tuk drivers all offering to take us to the centre. After a small amount of haggling by Emily off we went to try and find one of the guest houses that we had found on the internet. The tuk tuk driver dropped us off in a different part of town than we ha hoped for so we took a out stop for food and drink while we came up with a plan. We wandered around and found a nice guest house called nam sok 2 for 140,000 kip a night. We had a quick nap and headed out for the day. We had a look around the town to get out bearings and ended up at the night market and found the bar called utopia.

On the second day we visited the French bakery, then hired bikes from a love a couple of doors up the road. We cycled around and visited the UXO centre which was really insightful. We also crossed the bamboo bridge, we couldn't find the paper village as we hoped but we did find a really cute puppy and watched the sunset from the sunset bar on the river. That night Emily and I went the the elephant restaurant and had the laos tasting menu, which was really nice.

On day three we got up earlier and took a tuk tuk for about an hour to the waterfalls. As you renter the waterfall park there is a rescued sun bear centre. After visiting the bears we worked out way up to the top of the waterfalls. When reading about the waterfalls, normadic tom had wrote about a secret pool, and on our way up we saw 3 English boys climbing out of a no entry gate, we asked them about the secret pool and they confirmed that was the way there but not to go straight away as a guard was there. Taking on board there advice we carried on with our journey. At the top we looked out at the views and payed to take a bamboo boat to the source of the waterfall. On our way down from the top we bumped into a guy who told us about another way of finding the secret pool. He gave us good directions so found it with little problem and we also followed 3 other travelling girls. The secret pool was a lovely blue colour and didn't have many people there. We took a few photos and headed back to the tuk tuk as we told the driver we would be back in 3/4 hours. On the tuk tuk drive home a couple joined us too. The guy was from Austria and the girl was from New York. They had net in Chang mi. he was travelling around south East Asia and China via his peddle bike!
For dinner we went to the buffet style market. As I bought my food from a different stall I had to sit alone. This wasn't too bad as I bumped into mr and mrs adventure, and made friends with a Korean man called 'smile'. Emily, Tess and joe joined us after their food and we all had a few beers. We ended the night in utopia bar with smile. We also saw one of the guy from the gibbon experience in their too.

The weather was quite bad when we woke up so we went to the Internet cafe to download all of Emily's photos and had a breakfast burrito at cafe joma. In the evening we went to the Laos story telling evening, then went for a indoor meal to warm up! We also had a really nice Lao Lao mojitos!

The next day we got up early and took a bus to vang veing. Before we left I had a reaction to my malaria tablet and vomited bright green sick, not what you want before a 5 hour journey.