Nigel: Its been a while and there are going to be a few entries all at once but least you will have something to read over Xmas.

The journey to Luang Nantha was one of the worst and longest we have had to encounter on our travels. We set off at 8am with an anticipated time of arrival being 4pm, however, as we decided to pick up every hitch hiker along the way and stop to pull a bus out of a ditch we didn't get there till 6:30pm. When I say pull a bus out I mean watch our driver risk his life driving it out of the ditch. Lucky thing about it was we were thinking about getting this bus as its the local one and a bit cheaper. We are just glad that Alison wasn't so tight to say we had to get it. I won't go on about the journey but it was bad. The town of Luang Nantha is a very small place and is based around a long single main road. The main reasons that you come here is to go trekking and to see the local tribal people. We did manage to get a nice guest house in the town and we stayed here for 3 days. When we looked at booking tours we found that it was very expensive for just 2 people. We were hoping that there would be more people doing trekking, meaning it would bring the cost down, but there wasn't. We didn't mind though as we knew the next place we were going to we would have further opportunities.

We did hire bikes out for the day and go on a bike tour. We covered a large distance and it turned out to be the Tour de Luang Nantha as apposed to a gentle cycle. On our list of things/places we saw was small villages with many different hill tribes, the so called "stadium" (I think I have played in better stadiums when playing Sunday league) and the temple at the top of a very steep climb. Despite Alison moaning every step up the hill, it was well worth it.

Alison: Nigel has pretty much covered it all. Nice place but only worth going for a short visit. On to Muang Sing.....