The storm was still lingering in the morning as we set off from Champasak, it was raining - we caught a boat to the other side of the river and waited for a bus we had booked seats on. The rain got heavier and heavier as we all sheltered beneath a small hut. When the bus eventually arrived it was already packed, the conducter then frantically started searching around the local shops for some plastic chairs - we remembered this from our last trip. Bus companies wi...

Our second to last stop in Laos was another small town called Champasak down in the south. It only took a few hours to get there by minibus. We found some very cheap rooms with hammocks on the balcony by the river. As we were going out for lunch we got a message from Anton who we had met in Myanmar - he was up the road in Pakse and said he was also coming to Champasak. So now there was six people in our little travelling family! Champasak was very quiet and pre...

We had quite an early start for our journey to Tad Lo which is a very small village in the Bolaven Plateau, south east of Savannakhet. The bus left at 7am and was a really rubbish old death trap! The window next to me had a huge crack in it and some shards of glass sticking out the rusty frame. It also went really slow, slightly faster than a milk float! We pootled along for nearly six hours and then were deposited at Pakse's northern bus terminal - we were order...

We set off early from Vientiene, in the tuk tuk Rich realised that he had left his camera in the bike basket from the previous day - we went back and luckily it was still in the basket! We caught a very dusty old rust bucket of a bus to Savannakhet which is about 9 hours south of the capital. The drive was quite slow and the driver had some disgusting looking fish dish on the dashboard, as the journey went on the fat congealed on top of it - it was making us feel...

It was such a relief to leave Vang Vieng, we caught a bus to the capital of Laos - Vientiene. The drive took about 4 hours and we were dropped in the northern terminal several km's out of the city - despite being told we were going to be dropped in the city centre. There was another bus offering to take people into the centre but it was fairly expensive so we thought we'd go out the front of the terminal and get a tuk tuk, bizarrely all the tuk tuk drivers refuse...