The most common method of getting to Luang Prabang in Laos from Northen Thailand is to have a three day boat trip down the Mekong River starting from Huay Xai. I did not have that much time on my hands and so was delighted to find a one day boat trip advertised by Chiang Mai booking agent. So at 9.30pm on the same day as my cooking course, I left my guest house and was met by a local man who loaded me into the back of a pickup truck and after giving the driver some instructions in Thai, zoomed ahead on a motorbike. We eventually stopped at another seemingly random building where the original man greeted me again and joined me in the back of the truck. He gave me a yellow card with someones name and address and instructed me that we would be catching a bus and if we managed to get off at the correct stop, I should hold up this sign and a man would meet us and instruct us on the rest of the journey. He also gave me a receipt to show when getting on the boat. Then a Danish guy named Dehli, who had signed up to the same journey, got in the truck with me and was told I knew what to do and to follow me, and with that the truck drove us to our bus. We were told to board one of the buses by the taxi driver but luckily worked out for ourselves once he had left that we should actually get on the one next to it. The journey was fairly comfortable and when we arrived at our destination, the man I'd been told about actually ran onto the bus and found us, which was lucky as we were one of the last people on the bus and there was little else to indicate where we were. We piled off and into the man's open fronted office where he offered us coffee and gave us arrival cards to fill in for the border before another pickup truck came to drive us to the border, this being at around 3am. This drove us over the beautiful hills in North Eastern Thailand, when were fresh, green and foggy and over these we watched the sun rise until we reached the tiny border. We had to wait here for our contact from Laos to arrive with a truck on the other side of the border and we crossed at 8am without seeing any guards(The picture for this blog entry was taken from the Laos side of the border). Our driver disappeared for a while into Thailand and returned carrying two full cans of petrol unhindered across the border and started to siphon it into the truck, spilling it everywhere in the process. Petrol was cheaper in Thailand apparently.

The Laos border control was in a small white building with no markings of any sort. Inside was a small booth with a blacked out window, which in the mornign light I could actually see through to a small office lacking any form of computer. They somehow managed to check our passports though and sent us on our way. The drive was again over some beautiful hills although this time the road was a bumpy dirt track all the way! I admired the deep red colour of the soil as hills swept off into the distance on all sides, some covered in rainforest and some deforested. We passed rice fields and small villages and met working elephants coming the other way on the road. The journey took about 3 hours on the worst roads I've ever encountered but we eventually stopped on a silt bank next to the Mekong river. This was a beautiful spot with rainforest reaching down to the murky brown, fast flowing water on the opposite bank and grey rocks stuck out in the middle of the flow. A couple of strange looking boats sat on our bank, each 50m long and banana shaped and soon our boat, of similar design, arrived and struggled against the current to park alongside the others, leaving us to climb over them to board. It turned out that we had just bypassed the first two days of the normal three day journey and the boat was full of tired and uncomfortable tourists so we knew then we'd made the right choice! We drifted down them Mekong for hours, only scraping a few of the rocks, until we arrived at Luang Prabang at about 5pm. Dehli and I decided to share a guesthouse room to save money and we found some guesthouse owners who took us to their place on motorbikes.

Luang Prabang was a lovely place and as a former French colony, was not short of cafes offering fresh baguettes and cheese, these being fairly hard to come by in the rest of S.E Asia. We explored many of the back streets and temples along with the former royal palace turned museum which was fascinating, although no cameras allowed! We visited a few of the temples dotted around, including Wat Pa Huak, high on a hill in the centre of town from which you can see for quite a way in all directions. We intended to stay here for the sunset but it was a bit cloudy so we left early to go and explore the busy night market, one of my favourites! The buildings in the town felt vaguely familiar due to their European origins and it was strange to see a number of immaculately preserved classic cars. It was a town with a lot of charm.

Being short on time we left after a couple of days on a bus to Vang Vieng, although on the morning we left we had to have our guesthouse call the travel agents to wake up our hungover tuktuk driver to take us to the bus, which then ended up leaving 30 minutes late. Anyhow, we arrived in Vang Vieng in the late afternoon, just in time to find accomodation, book a climbing trip for the following morning and to find a bar, where we sat with cold beers in hammocks overlooking the Nam Song river until after dark when we went to find one of the many restaurants that played Friends episodes on an endless loop. In the morning we found our way to the meeting point for climbing and were driven to be kiited out with shoes and harnesses. A van then drove us to the start of a short but difficult trek up to the climbing crag. I was the first in the group to climb and was pleased to find I hadn't completely forgotten what I was doing, climbing being my number one hobby back home. We only got a couple of climbs each but it was well worth it, not least for the views from the top of the climb. When we arrived back at the guesthouse, however, I found that my camera had developed a lense error and I could no longer use it. Also when I tried to withdraw cash later, the power to the entire town went out just after my card had been returned but before my cash had been dispensed, leaving me to borrow from Dehli. The evening was set to brighten my mood though as we were going tubing. This is the main reason most backpackers in Laos come to Vang Vieng. You rent the inflated inner tube of a tractor tyre, get driven 4km upstream and float back down on the fast flowing current. This is made more fun by the fact that the bank of that particular stretch of river just happen to be lined with bars, fishing people in with long sticks or ropes. So we stopped off at a few of these bars and drank a number of whisky and coke buckets and beers in our swim shorts, paying with soggy money. The bars also had rope swings from high platforms into the river which was great fun. One bar had a pool table, a slingshot shooting range and a Boule pit. When we came to the last bar however I lost sight of Dehli and assumed he had stopped off when really he'd gone to the finish. So I got out and went up to the rope swing. This is where it all went wrong. Someone in the que suggested doing a backflip off the swing into the river and, being the acrobatic type (not), I thought this would be a great idea. The end result was that I landed face first in the water, broke my nose and bruised the right side of my face. Luckily I stayed fully conscious and paddled back to the bar to get some ice before drifting to the finish. By this time it was dark and inspite of my mishapen face, I loved the sensation of drifting along the river with no other noise with only the dark outlines of the surrounding cliffs visible and so was slightly startled when met by some locals wading out into the river to point us to the finish. Back on land I found Dehli, who straightened my nose with a quick but painful tweak and we both called it a night.

In the morning, hiding the bruising beneath my sunglasses, I finally said goodbye to Dehli and got on a bus to Vientiane, the Laos capital. After an uneventful journey, we arrived and I found my way to a guesthouse just a short walk from the main square, Nam Phu. I was only here for the evening and had to get a bus the next day back to Bangkok in order to catch my flight to Hong Kong. I managed to find a lovely french restaurant on Nam Phu for dinner and having been unable to book a bus leaving early enough the morning, simply made my way to the local bus station and picked up a bus to the Thai border at Nong Khai for 17000 kip, about £1, from where I could catch one of the frequent Thai buses to Bangkok.