Pakse is a very pleasant town that is almost waiting to be filled with lots of people. There are huge new wide roads and smart traffic lights and big hotels - including one MONUMENTAL one that used to be a Royal palace before the revolution. It's just that Laos doesn't really have a big population and even with the odd influx of travellers at peak season it still feels remarkably quiet. On our first night we were wandering through the town and came across...

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!Laos is phenomenally relaxed and the further south you go it becomes practically horizontal! The overnight bus was probably the most luxurious yet - it had "king of BUS" stencilled on the windscreen - and I even got some sleep! (my wonderful fiancee has a great talent to nod off wherever but I rarely sleep on these things). We stopped once in the early hours where there was a surreal incident involving a Buddhist monk from Idaho (who I sp...

Vientiane sits on the mighty Mekong river, overlooking Thailand. On arrival you are sort of left with the impression that you are in a village suburb and then when you check the map it dawns that actually this IS it. The little fountain square is actually the epicentre! Compared with the heaving mayhem of places like Bangkok or Hanoi, Laos has a far far more sensible and laid-back approach to a capital city with the right balance of quiet streets and nice restaur...

We arrived in Vang Vieng having heard mixed reports. Undoubtably the biggest draw for a lot of travellers is to go "tubing" down the river and stopping at the many bars that dot the river bank, each with unique and increasingly dangerous ways to jump back into the water. Others had raved about the beauty of the remote location and the excellent rock climbing and other activites. Another good reason to stop was that it offered a tempting halfway house on...

Arrival at Luang Prabang was quite a relief. Not only was I suffering a tad from a bug and grateful for terra firma but we sailed effortlessly through immigration to a low key taxi booth where a taxi driver awkwardly suggested that we might want to take a songthaow into town and then withdrew for us to make our minds up. This is so markedly different from the up-front in your face style of the place we had come from that it took a few moments to relax the defensi...