Welcome to our latest belated blog post. After the effort of getting to and from Sayaboury to see our friendly elephants we had a very lazy day in Luang Prabang doing not very much at all. Another day, another long bus journey heading south through the mountains to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. We paid slightly more to go on the 'VIP' tourist bus, which was actually relatively comfortable. It was not powerful enough for the hills though, making painfully slo...

We first heard of the Elephant Conservation Centre (ECC) from an in-flight magazine whilst flying from Borneo some months ago. Its mission is to offer the chance to learn more about the tradition of keeping domestic elephants whilst making practical efforts to conserve the rapidly vanishing domestic and wild elephant numbers in Laos. The centre has the only elephant hospital in Laos, and runs mobile vet units to remote parts of Laos to treat elephants, it also ...

After the bustle of the Thai towns and cities, Luang Prabang was rather different. Laos doesn't do big towns (yet) and we weren't even sure we had actually arrived in LP when the boat pulled up at the pier. None of the buildings were more than 2 storeys high, and from the boat it just didn't look big enough to be one of Laos' main cities. This is probably one of its main charms though. As we walked up the concrete ramp from the boat we started to see what mak...

Here is a summary of our four day adventure to get to Luang Prabang in Laos. From Chiang Mai in Thailand there are many ways to do this as follows: 1. Take a flight (easy but expensive and great if short on time) 2. Let a tour company in Chiang Mai take you all the way for a high price 3. Find your own way through bit by bit! Guess which one we went for - that's right option 3. After saying goodbye to Graham at our hostel we checked out and headed to the bus...