Sabai dee from laos!

Its so hot and wonderful and manky and friendly and everything all at once!

We left bangkok in thailand and headed east to a national park where we had to hitch several lifts to get into the visitor centre. We paired up with a french couple and went on a night safari. There are tigers and elephants but they are very rare to see, our best sighting was monkeys, porcupines and deer.

You are allowed to walk around the park yourself at nights so we went a little wander, i jumped out of my skin everytime i heard a noise! The next morning we hired bikes and cycled the 20km around the main central road in the park. Not many animals but beautiful views and several schools of young buddhist monks being walked through the park.

We then spent 24hours on a billion different buses and tuk tuks (which are awesome, so much fun!) to get to the north of thailand, to a town called nong khai. We've decided to leave travelling through the top of thailand as its lots of mountains, temples and villages. Something we will see plenty of in the weeks to come. So nong khai was our only taster, a crazy town by the mekong river with a night market that sells so many bugs to eat it would put darwins collection to shame! We stayed in an amazing hostel run by an american couple - 3pound for a double room and banana porridge for breakfast (we're easily pleased these days!) The hostel had a garden/restaurant/relaxing area that was really lovely - we spent a few days recharging the batteries there.

From nong khai we crossed the border to laos - a crazy border but once you get through the haze of touts and tuk tuk drivers we got into beautiful laos. Its lovely (although still too hot!). Their captial, vientiane was only a few miles from the border so we spent a few days looking at amazing temples, sampling herbal saunas and massages and enjoying some free aircon (kezz worked out how to start it without having to pay for it! woohoo!)

We then had a crazy adventure going east to an eco lodge called ban pako, its in the middle of jungle and took a truck and a boat to get into. As we're out of season there was only us and one english couple there. We had the whole beautiful place to ourselves. We slept and read and swam in the river, ate too much and walked into the local villages. It was wonderful apart from finding a poisonous spider running up my leg in the middle of the night!

From the lodge to another national park, we hoped to spend the night up an observation tower watching elephants but it was too expensive so instead we spent a fun afternoon with the villagers!

Back into the captial tonight to head north tommorow and after a few days exploring we'll cross into vietnam.

miss you all, thanks for the messages (especially you keller!)

k and m x x x x