After another ridiculous 5 hour bus journey (that was supposed to be 2) we arrived at Vientiane. We went for our 'last supper' together as tomorrow would be the day that Vic went on to see Cambodia and Thailand. We thought we'd keep it traditional and had chilli con carne, lasagne and fajitas!

Said our emotional goodbyes as Vic headed off for the airport. The three of us had spent 3 months together; a funny feeling when we said "see you in 9 months"!

Our guesthouse was situated right on the Mekong river. Sounds like a great location where you could sit back, soak up the scenery and watch the locals at work, and you'd be right...if you could see anything past the ever-growing wall of sandbags!! Until we looked into booking our ticket down to the south we didn't quite realise the extent of the flooding. We went from choosing to spending a leisurely few days in this chilled out city to frantically running from one tour office to another in the bid to get the next plane out of there! All the roads were closed which meant there were no buses or trains at all...begrudgingly we booked a flight to Bangkok for a few days time.

We'd booked into the Novotel (courtesy of Mark) for Friday night (we were now on Thursday) and presumed we were safe seeing as we had a flight out of Laos. We were wrong...

That night Jen and Sal went to bed as usual (scratching like mad due to far too many mosquito bites!). A short while later Sal turned to Jen and said "Is that the rain?", not for 1 minute thinking Jen would say 'yes'. We have never heard anything like it and panic soon struck the pair of us. Despite recognising the water could not rise to the 4th floor of the hotel, we packed in record time and nervously made our way downstairs in the hope that the tuk tuks would still be working and would take us to the airport. Even if there wasn't an earlier flight we told ourselves at least being there we would be safe and looked after!!

Thankfully the hotel manager laughed in our faces as we explained our concerns and told us to go back to bed! Surprisingly we felt a lot better and slept quite well considering.

We woke up to clear, beautiful blue skies and laughed at our over-reaction the night before.

Oh, by the way, en route to the hotel Jen went absolutely flying and fell on the floor in a puddle. Seeing as she had both her bags on her back it was pretty impossible to get back up. Sal kindly thought this was a great photo opportunity before helping poor little Jennie get back on her feet. Can we also point out at this point that Sal cut her hand (quite badly) whilst tubing...you'll notice, there's no mention of it in the blog or on the photos...Sal got on with things like normal as she didn't want any fussing. Jen, however, walks into the Novotel limping, covered in mud, holding out her slightly grazed hand as though it was about to fall off, whilst squeezing either side of the cut hoping more blood would trickle out. She wasn't at all phased by the sign advising all guests to leave the country asap because of the 'alarming water levels'...oh no, Jen now had a water based, life threatening infection!

After Jen got over the hysteria and found an antiseptic wipe we spent the day soaking up the sun by our private pool. It was so great being in a nice hotel with a duvet, hot water and would you believe it...a BATH!! Oh my god, it was heaven - seemed like the perfect location to discuss our next destination as the flooding meant we had to completely change the order of our route. This became very difficult..do we go to Bali, Malaysia or Chiang Mai (North Thailand) next??

After the best nights sleep (and buffet breakfast) we felt re-energised ready to move on to the hell hole that is Bangkok!

Laos is a very pretty and green country from what we've seen. It's unbelievably laid back, it's the kind of place to come to do treks where you can meet the locals and appreciate the landscapes, as we did in Luang Prabang. The food has been pretty similar to Vietnam (which we didn't tell you about!) in that every breakfast revolves around baguettes and any variety of egg you could possibly want. It gets a bit much after a while as they're real heavy baguettes, at least in Vietnam they were very light, crispy ones!! The Laos traditional dish is Laap which we tried with fish but you can have with any meat. It is chopped up and marinated in lime, garlic, coriander and served ion lettuce leaves with sticky rice. We both really enjoyed it.

We've had a good time in Laos but don't feel you need much longer than 2 weeks to explore the country. We're disappointed we didn't get to see the south but from what people have told us we've seen the best sites.