Our next destination was a small town north of Luang Prabang on the Nam Ou river. Eleanor and Carolyn were also heading there and also Rich who was on the slowboat decided to head there too. We were all squashed into a minivan for the three hour drive. We arrived at a very small bus station and caught a tuk tuk into the town centre. It was a very small place in a valley between green mountains, we walked over a bridge over the river and sent the men off to find ...

Lovely Luang Prabang! We came here on our last trip and were delighted to find that it hadn't changed that much since 2007. It's such a pretty little place on a peninsula with the Mekong River to one side and the Nam Khan river to the other side. The town has gorgeous old french buildings amongst trees with pink, orange and red blossoms - it also has many temples. We were so lucky to be able to come again, we had prebooked our room through agoda and caught the tu...

As we were in Chiang Rai, Thailand and wanted to cross into Laos it was logical to enter into Huay Xai (about 2 hours away). As Laos is so mountainous the only options you have to get to the town of Luang Prabang is either by the slowboat down the mekong which takes 2 days with a stopover in a small town, or to get a night bus that snakes through the mountains and takes at least 15 hours. We decided on the slow boat - when we came to Laos before we had crossed ov...

We set ourselves up for a six hour journey to Chiang Mai to Chiang Rai - we couldn't understand how the journey was going to take so long as it looked so close on the map - so we got bus tickets for the Green bus which was a really lovely air con bus with a hostess that handed out food, water and wet wipes! We arrived in Chiang Rai after 3 hours - our stupid lonely planet again had the wrong info in it!! Chiang Rai was a lot smaller than Mai - the bus station wa...

It took about 5 hours to get to Chiang Mai on the bus from Sukothai, we arrived after a very heavy downfall and the bus station was pretty flooded. We had prebooked a room at Junior guesthouse and they offered free pick up, the couple that run the guesthouse were so lovely and were interested in our travels and when they showed us our room they said welcome home! It was a really nice room in the old part of the city. We had been to Chiang Mai on our last trip an...