I have made it to Vang Vieng, which seems to be the Broad Street of South East Asia.This town is insane; we're staying in a clean guesthouse with hot water in the centre of town, and we're surrounded by internet cafes, places to upload stuff on your i-pod, restaurants showing reruns of Friends and serving "hangover cure" breakfasts, and a selection of Westerners walking around wearing not much clothing. The backdrop to this are some towering, craggy mountains which look as though they're in walking distance. The "traveller" centre appears to take up a radius of about three small streets - I went for a walk earlier to find an ATM and found myself face to face with several goats and a herd of cows. I love Laos, it's completely mental. Even though we're in this very commercialised foreigners' capital, it is still very much Laos.

So the journey here. If you remember I last wrote from Luang Prabang the day before I set off to see the Plain of Jars at Phonsavan. Now, the scenery in Laos is beautiful, really amazing and different to anything I've ever seen before. It's incredibly hilly, hundreds of tiny hills which get bigger and bigger until they're mountains, covered in thick jungle so everything is bright green. Occasionally you get some rock sticking out and some oddly shaped hills, it's really dramatic and very beautiful. Nice to look at, but not so nice to go on an eight hour bus ride up and down and round and round the hills on a weak stomach. The roads follow what was obviously the original path for hundreds of years when they just had buffalo and cows as transport, it winds around every single little hill, there is no such thing as a straight road here. You know it's not going to be a pleasant journey when they hand out extra sick bags at the start. We all made it to Phonsavan without parting with our breakfasts, but we were all a little green around the gills to say the least. G and S recovered but I deteriorated instead and ended up being ill again all through the night. I missed the Plain of Jars trip in favour of lying in bed and watching The Mummy, but it turns out I didn't miss much, as I asked the girls when they got back "so, what was it like?" - "oh, you know, there were some jars, on some plains". I also made a new friend in the guesthouse, this little cat who sat on my lap for a while and then suddenly gave a miaow, jumped off me and went under a table. I followed (well, not under the table, but in the general vicinity) and found three teeny tiny completely adorable kittens (and many fleas). It was so cute and I stayed there watching them for like an hour, until the girls came back and said "what on earth are you doing on the floor?".

There really wasn't much to do in Phonsavan itself, although there was a place run by MAG, I forget what it stands for, but they are essentially the bomb disposal team. Apparently during the Vietnam war Laos got involved (or rather some other countries involved Laos) and became the most bombed country ever. More bombs were dropped on Laos in the 1970s than were on Germany and Japan combined during WWII. They estimate that one third of these bombs didn't explode when they were dropped and now there are literally millions of unexploded bombs lying around in villages, fields and jungle. As most of Lao people work in agriculture and especially rice-growing, you can imagine what kinds of problems this causes. One of the reasons that Laos is so poor is that to farm any new land they have to clear it first, and it's more than likely there will be bombs there. There are some little ones calles "Bombies" which are the size of tennis balls; these were only dropped on villages in the countryside and lots of them are still active. It's very common for people to stand on these or disturb them when farming. Even more worrying, is that kids either play with them because they think they're toys, or try and pull them apart to get the gunpowder of the scrap metal which they can sell. Even the adults do this, and with bigger bombs as well. We saw a film of one guy who tried to unscrew the cap off a bomb big enough to wipe out his entire village just so he could sell the scrap metal. MAG is trying to educate people, especially children, about how dangerous the bombs are, and they currently deactivate/destroy something like 15,000 bombs a year. Mental.

The journey here was better, we had a slightly nicer driver who seemed to value comfort above speed, and I promptly went to bed on arrival yesterday. Today I have done nothing more productive than sleep, watch Monsters Inc, eat porridge and find an ATM, but I'm still in need of recovery so I needed a lazy day. Hopefully by my next blog I'll be ship-shape! Me and Steph may be going rock-climbing tomorrow. We seem to be catching the beginning of rainy season though as it has rained every day for the past week, so rock-climbing may be no-go. And yes, I will be trying the tubing, as it is a must-thing to do and I really shouldn't knock it without trying it. But probably with soft drinks, especially as I'm still a bit poorly.