The bus broke down 10 mins outside of Pakse, it was so comfortable compared to the other ones we'd been on; even if something did drip on us during the night - i was glad i didn't see the ants crawling around until morning though! Fortunately the replacement bus arrive after about 10 mins and we were in Pakse by 7:30. A quick hop in a tuk tuk shared with the german guy got us across town to the local bus station and we had 10h to wait for the next bus to Tadlo....

We decided to go and see the oldest Wat in town. On the way passing the presidential Palace the roads we closed off, some dignitaries around for a conference on Cluster Bombs (their evils) so we saw a few motorcades with outriders- it was pretty cool. The Wat (Buddhist Temple) was nice enough, it has thousands of images of Buddha in various shapes and sizes in alcoves around the outside walls. We started talking to a monk, turns out he's a big football fan, ...

So 2nd day in LP and we did pretty much nothing, wandered round, played cards eat at the Scandinavian bakery. The Hostel we're saying at has a free dinner every Saturday so at 6PM we had some really authentic noodles cooked by the owner- if only she could sort out the wildlife in the bathrooms it would be a great hostel! Tom: Definitely! Damn millipedes and bugs on the wall! It's quite funny how much of a 'small world' this travelling thing is. We met a G...

So we got the bus to Luang Prabang and was one of the worst bus rides ever. We were in very narrow seats and our knees were crushed againt the seat in front and to make it worse, the people who had re space put their charis back. The b*** (Brett edit) in front of me didn't understand that my knees were squashed and gave me manty a disgruntled look. It also took ages and me and Brett couldn't sleep at all. Later that day we had three naps! However, it was a love...

Today we got sun burnt. Not too badly. The problem was that we hired bikes, so while flitting around Vientienne we felt fairly cool, not realising that the very bright sun was landing straing onto a very flat still arms. Ah well, live and learn- moral of the story if riding bike take sun screen with us. We started out at the Triumphal arch. It is referred to locally as the vertical air strip, because it is made of cement that was donate by the US to build a ru...