After a couple of days rest (Jack's arms were hurting from the tubing!) I went kayaking (Jack didn't go because he wasn't feeling too good). There were 3 other girls there, so i wasn't by myself! Before we started kayaking, we went tubing through some caves that were really low down, you'll see when i put pictures on! It was good fun, but a little bit scary!

After that, we kayaked for 23kilometres (a very long way, tough on the arms!) back to Vang Vieng. It was good fun, and we stopped off at the bars on the way back down.

The next day we got the bus to Luang Prebang. It's nice there, and we bumped into Simon and Scarlett aswell. The next day the 4 of us hired a tuk tuk to the waterfalls there, they are absolutely gorgeous. Simon, Scarlett and I went swimming in the turquoise pools at the bottom - nice and refreshing because it was really hot!

We all left that afternoon on the dreaded bus to the border town of Hoey Xai to cross back into Thailand. We were going to get a flight, but it was about 5 times the price of the bus, and it was a small plane with Laos airlines - I got worried about it, especially hearing about their extremely poor safety record - so we opted for the bus instead! The bus journey turned out to be a total nightmare. It started off good, but it got really uncomfortable. We couldn't sleep and the bus was packed - people sitting on plastic chairs in the aisle again! At about 2.00am lots of people got off the bus and we had 2 seats to ourselves, but still really uncomfortable - i didnt sleep but Jack did. The roads are so wyndy and for about 2 hours it seemed like the bus was just doing constant U-turns! We popped a tyre at about 5.30am and waited about half an hour for them to put a new one on. Apparently everyone in Laos has really small bladders - we had to stop every half hour so that they could go and pee in a bush! Really annoying!!!  They also had two more unplanned stops - the first one, everyone got off and bought cucumbers (?!?!?) and the second one, everyone got off and bought pineapples!!!  Wierd.

We finally arrived there are 10.30am (we left at 6pm the night before) and headed for the border. Thailand is just separated by the Mekong river from Laos, so we had to get a boat over. You leave Laos, get your passport stamped, and the boat is in no mans land!! When we got through the border, we got a bus straight to Chang Rai - it was only 3 hours, but in total we'd been travelling for 22 hours with no sleep when we got there!!