i nearly died yesterday, but I'll come to that in a minute because first of all, the day before, being Friday, I had one of the best days of my entire life! We started with a 3 hour drive from Vietiane to Vang Vieng, the birthplace of the legendary river tubing pubcrawl. The group I was with however, decided they wanted to go kayaking, so i left them to it. I was given a rubber ring, and a dry bag for my things, and set off for a relaxing float down the river......

The day after the incident with the village and the lights and the darkness, we headed down the river again. In all we were on the boat for about 7 hours although this time it was far rainier and overcast and we stopped only once to visit the cave of a thousand Buddahs. In all honesty, I'm getting a bit Buddah'd out...ive seen enough of him at this stage to the point where I'm starting to think he only became "the enlightened one" because everywhere he ...

Oh my days, I have so much to write The night before the river boat, the rest of my group went to bed after we had a drink in an American Indian style teepee with a complete local nutcase. Anyway, I found a bar that was showing the FA Cup football, and met a Thai couple on holiday north from Bangkok. They were so sound, and with the barman, and his mother, (who proceeded to show me photos of the barman when he was a child) we ended up cracking open a bottle of l...