now in the capital of laos after spending longer than expected in vang vieng, mainly because we were drunk for long periods of time, but the 5 days there were awsome but very surreal. sorry if the rest this is written in a confusing order but thats life.

vang vieng is one of the strangest places we've been to so far and is a small is town that is now a must for backpackers, and it is just purely a backpackers community (the town was just most of the same people that were on our slow boat) and pretty western its popularity is mainly because of 'tubing' which basically you get driven about 3 km up river and float in a big rubber ring back to town stopping off at bamboo bars that have been put up on the banks and you drink and then go on 15 metre high rope swings into the river AWESOME!! (exept for one of the swings my hands slipped and i fell early nearly landing on a girl that was floating past) we did tubing for two days, then to recover during the day there were loads of bars/resturants where you could just chill pick a film or watch the endless repeats of friends or family guy and in the evenings we went to more bars good times. i've now sampled the delights of whisky with snakes and scorpians in the bottle it tastes nice. In the family guy bars you would ask for a menu and they would bring you one for food and just quite casually a 'happy' menu which would have pretty much anything such as milkshakes and pizzas with a choice of either opium, weed or mushrooms.

ok yesterday we kayaked from vang vieng to vientiane it took 8 hours instead of the 4 hours bus but it was pretty kl we went down rapids in the kayak(unsucsessfully) and without the kayak just jumping into them off a rock, then we kayaked a bit more to a cliff were you could jump 15 meters into the water below which was scary (chris wimped out). kayaked a bit more (me and chris flipped more than anyone else). then we got a truck type tuk tuk the rest of the way to vientiene we got 19 people on it and i reckon its designed for about 8/9.

gotta go now will keep you posted

peace out