(2 November)

Today we were up at half 6 and got a tuk tuk down to get on a boat up the Mekong river. We had a local guide for this part, who was, quite frankly, completely mad! We were all pretty tired, and would have been happy to sleep for a bit on the boat, but this guy had other ideas! The boat itself was pretty cool, it was a long family boat, loads of space for us all and definitely the most comfortable way to travel I've had so far...although I'm sure if we hadn't had a private one it wouldn't have been quite as good! We really were lucky with the standard of this tour!

The scenery was gorgeous as well, it was really nice...except for the guide. He actually would not stop talking! At all! He had a really strong accent too, so I could barely even understand what he was saying, but I do know that he was just talking absolute crap after a while lol. He started off not too bad, talking about Laos and stuff and then just seemed to be talking to hear his voice, and started acting like a monkey and doing weird dancing... Absolute nutcase. People started feigning sleep and some just put their headphones in, and Maria was passed out on the floor cos she'd been out the night before, and he ended up focusing all his attention on me and Laura because we were too polite to ignore him. It was so ridiculous I kept having laughing fits lol, especially every time I caught Claire's eye haha. Eventually I just started taking pictures and doing anything to get away haha. It actually got to the point where I was putting my headphones in every time I saw him coming, but wasn't turning my iPod on so I didn't waste the battery haha!

Apart from crazy man the boat was great, I borrowed a book off Rory which was really good, and sunbathed a bit, blogged a bit, had a wee nap. We were on the boat for about 10 hours, then into a hotel in a tiny stopover town where we just had dinner and went to bed. Claire and I had a bit of a standoff between a massive spider that was in the bathroom haha, and then there was a few Mosquitos and cockroaches... Not my favourite hotel!