As we are short on time we decided to go on a day trip to Halong bay as we had been told that it was a 'must see' place and although we hate tour groups thought that we best put up with other tourists for one day so we could see it. Our hotel kept hassling us to book a tour through them to Halong bay, so we shopped around and they did end up being the cheapest so we booked with them. It was an early start so we got up expecting someone to be up so we could have ...

The flight from Vientiane was painless enough, it was delayed by a couple of hours but the airport was ok so no problem. Our bodies had a bit of a shock when we got off the plane though, going from 32 degrees to 15 degrees in the space of an hour is not good! Our first impressions of Vietnam was that it was similar to India in a lot of ways with everyone feeling the need to honk their horn for no apparent reason, men pissing in the street at any available opportu...

Not really that much to say about Vientiane as it is just a stop off before we fly to Vietnam. It is the capital of Laos, but is like no other capital city we have been to, its more like a provincial town, the roads are not that busy, there is not really that much to see apart from a few temples, but it has been a nice place to just walk around. On our first night we were still with Tanya and Neil, so after tea we went to the bowling alley as this place stays op...

Well we left Phonsovan a bit emotional about all the devistation, but really glad we made that stop due to the amount of information we learnt about laos, it can't really be called history at this moment in time as this devistation is still happening almost every day. We went in search of sunnier climes with the hope of relaxing for a bit, and we definately got what we wanted. Vang Vieng is a place that most travellers stop of at for a few days, that turns into ...

We set off to Phonsavan not knowing what we would expect. The weather had been so cold in Luang Prabang we changed our plans at the last minute to see more sites rather than a more active approach further north. We also wanted to see more of rural Laos at the same time and to see the infamous plain of jars. More on them in a moment. After a bus journey of 7 hours and with numerous stops for the poor travel sick laos people we arrived to be greeted by plenty of pe...