Today is my last day in Luang Prabang, and Laos. I am heading to Thailand tonight and will be in Chang Rai tomorrow afternoon for the beginning of the end. I am pretty much half way through my trip. Only 6 more weeks left until I return home :)

Before arriving in Luang Prabang I spent a few days in Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a must for any 18 year old backpacker (especially if you're from England) due to a little thing called tubing. Although I'm not 18 and not from England I thought it was a must for me too. Basically tubing is floating down a river in a tube while stopping off at the riverside bars along the way and getting drunk. There are also swings at most of the bars that you can use for jumping in the river. I didn't actually get a tube because I hadn't brought enough money but one did happen to float down the river all on it's lonesome at one stage during the day and so I thought that it was fair game, rescued it, and made it my own. Unfortunately it started to rain mid afternoon and although this made the tug-of-war bar a little more exciting/muddy it did get a bit cold. All in all it was a pretty good day, we ended up floating back into town about 7pm just on nightfall and then went home to change and continued to get drunk. The next day I had a massive headache and spent the day in bed watching how I met your mother.

Suprisingly, the scenery surrrounding the town is amazing. The town itself is s***. It's kind of disheartening when you check the menu at 3 different restaurants only to find that the menu's are exactly the same. But I guess most people don't really care as they are just there to get drunk and go tubing. So, I decided to leave once my hangover was gone and head further north to Luang Prabang where I am now.

Although the bus trip was over 5 hours along winding mountain roads, the views were breathtaking. But for some reason I was on the wrong side of the bus to take photo's, when I finally got to see some on my side and decided to get my camera out we started to descend. Missed opportunity. So I recommend the bus trip between Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang to anyone coming to Laos :)

Luang Prabang is a really nice town, the nicest I have been to in Laos. I met an Australian girl a couple of days ago and we went to the Tat Kuang Si waterfalls about 30km away. The waterfalls themselves weren't anything to write home about, but the colour of the water in the pools was amazing. You could also swim in some of the pools and so we went for a dip. A nice way to spend the day.

Later that day we went to see some caves which contain thousands of budda's that people have been bringing to the cave for hundreds of years. I didn't think it was that great, especially since we had to take a ride up the river for an hour and a half and I hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. We did stop off at a place on the way back and sample some rice wisky (Lao Lao).

So today I am just going to visit some of the temples around town and then it's onto the overnight bus to the border. Looking forward to Thailand.