Hello all avid followers of the blog, and those who are now getting a bit bored of the updates. Hope you are all well.

Following our extended stay in Chiang Mai we arranged for our crossing over the eastern Thai border into Laos. So, with my iPod at the ready with two volumes of the best of Bowie, it's into opium heaven we go!!

Now for all those who have never heard of Loas (and admittedly I hadn't until around 10 months ago), here are a few interesting (although I'll let you be the judge of that) facts:

-The Lao People's Democratic Republic has reluctantly only opened it's doors to foreign tourists in the last 10 years

-Having been ruled by several invaders, notably the Burmese, The Siamese (Thailand) and the French, Laos has experienced a revolution in 1975 which saw years of xenophobic communist rule

-Laos was draw in into the Vietnam war, as the Vietminh used the country to transport food and weapons to the South (using the Ho Chi Minh trail) - The US' response was to bomb the sh*t out of the place

-The US (illegally, and largely without reporting this to its populace) flew 580,944 sorties - or 177 a day - over Laos and dropped 2,093, 100 tons of bombs - equivalent to one planeload every 8 minutes around the clock for 9 years - making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the history of warfare (including both world wars)

- If your's truly doesn't watch their step, we could end up stepping on one of the vast amounts of unexploded land mines still crippling thousands a year

So, now you're all up to speed, on we go….

We avoided the endless tourists going into Laos at the more conventional border crossing, by hiring a driver to take us into the mountains and use a crossing that hasn't been open to non-Loations for very long. How adventurous!

So the journey from Chiang Mai to the border was around 8 hours, upon which we came across our first hurdle; the bored and quite unintelligent immigration man, who probably hadn't seen another homosapien for over a decade, quizzed us on where England was, where then is the UK, where is Britain, and why do you say the UK and Britain, what's the difference??...........if you think about it, the Britain/UK observation is actually not a bad line of questioning, and one we couldn't easily respond to....answers on a postcard please.

After the formalities were complete, we had to walk the 50 yards over the border (which was in fact just two huts, and into Laos.

We then continued with another driver, in a separate van to some god forsaken town in the middle of the mountains that we still don't know the name of. There we were given the worst food we've ever tasted (not sure what it was) before being shown to our bedrooms at 20:30 by Laos' only transvestite - the whole village was just a few random buildings, no TV's (only radio) and no shops!! We were however subject to great amusement of the locals, who couldn't believe there were people with white skin and odd clothes and backpacks in the world!

The next morning we donned our flip-flops and shorts and were hoarded into the back of a pick up truck only to realize it was about -50000 Celsius and we're were driving on pot-holed dirt tracks with 1000000 meter drops on each side heading towards the Mekong river to catch our boat to Luang Prabang.

Despite this though, the dramatic beauty of the mountain pass was definitely worth it and one which was worth the money alone to see.

We caught the slow boat which was, even though jam packed with tourists who had gone the more conventional route, a memorable 8 hour journey down one of the worlds longest rivers to the country's second largest City, and a UNESCO world heritage site…..

After the beautiful mountain pass, and riverboat journey we arrived in Luang Prabang at around 17:30 and were lucky enough to find some accommodation pretty quickly.

Luang Prabang, on the banks of the Mekong, is a very pretty place which is saturated with French colonial architecture and surrounded by emerald green mountains.

Here we didn't actually get up to too much apart from visited some [just ok] caves, and a pretty impressive waterfall, But we did fully utilize the café culture to sit, get drunk on the fine brew that is BeerLaos, and generally people watch (we are continually bumping into people we've meet in other countries which makes it an even better crack…….cos Belle's is getting a bit stale now!.....only joking!).

So after some deliberating on whether we stay in Laos for another week [as it's seemed such a cool place] we've decided to stick with our rough schedule and get a flight to Vietnam………on Laos Airlines……..probably the worst safety record in world aviation….we wished ourselves all the best…….maybe we should have hit the opium!