Merry Christmas! Hope everyone had a great one. We celebrated in Vang Vieng in Laos - tubing down the Nam Song river! Great fun - its a pub crawl on a river basically, and each bar has swings and flight boxes into the river. When finished at one bar you sit in your tube and float down the river until you're pulled in by the next one! It was strange to see people floating down with FC hats on! We met some guys from Finland who were very wasted and spent the night partying with them, after a strange Christmas dinner (and our attempts to speak Finnish)!

Vang Vieng was super relaxed, although very backpackery - perfect for Christmas. It's quite small with TV bars lining the streets - which was great for recovery on boxing day. We spent Christmas eve on some dodgy bikes and rode around the villages outside and visited a couple of caves (then headed to Smile bar (on an island over a bamboo bridge - safe?!!) and had a usual Christmas eve - Lara did anyway!)

After Vang Vieng we headed back up to Luang Prabang and then onto Hanoi. Despite what we had heard, it was a really nice and interesting city. The only crazy thing about it was the traffic - just walk out and they'll drive around you! We now understand why people have refered to Hanoi as a relaxed chaos! We did a very successful and full sightseeing day - including a water puppet show in the evening which was wicked. Loads of crazy Vietnamese music, singing, and funky coloured strange puppets bobbing around in a stage of water!

We are now in Cat Ba in Halong Bay. We are spending New Years on a boat - bit different but should be cool.

Hope everyone has a great New Years. xxx

P.S. Happy Birthday to Pidge and Carol for tomorrow!