After Pai myself and Owen decided to head to Vang Vieng in Laos. This journey took us 24 hours in total. Mainly it was incident free until we reached Laos. We had only rode down the street 300 metres by bus when we went flying into a parked car. The bus driver did not seemed to care and carried on as if nothing had happened. Everyone in the bus sort of looked at one another as if to say "did that just happen". And after spending a month in Laos we learnt that transport is full of near misses when it comes to driving on the road. There were so many times when we thought we would hit a chicken, cat, dog, pig, cow or someone on their motorbike. Lucky enough we only hit the car. Other travellers were not so fortunate.

Vang Vieng is a beautiful looking town surrounded by limestone cliff faces. The place is known for tubing down the Mekong river. When we arrived the Mekong was flooded therefore, we did not go tubing. Ten years ago I visited Vang Vieng with my family. Going back to the place showed how much it had changed. Now the town is set up for tourist visitors where it was not ten years ago. There are lots of places to eat and watch re-runs of friends episodes on big screen televisions. One day we hired a scooter and went to look at all the different caves and watering holes. It was awesome riding down dirt tracks with highlighted green rice fields and massive cliffs next to us.

After a few days we headed to Luang Prabang. This town really comes a live at night time. They close down the road and it it lights up to a fabulous night market. Potentially the best market we have come across in South East Asia because everything that they sold was different to the normal market stuff we have come across.

Once again we hired scooters and had a look at famous waterfalls: Tad Sae and Kuang Si. Tad Si was awesome, there were many elphants here bathing in the water whilst people were swimming. Kuang Si was massive! Mainly because it is wet season now and the water fall has grown extensively. The power of Kuang Si was impressive to say the least. It is no wonder why the Mekong river is so large during wet season!

After leaving Luang Prabang we decided to head south to a town called Tha Khaek. There is not much to do here other than being a good starting point to do the loop. This is where you hire a scooter and travel up to Kong Lo Cave which is situated 180km north east from Tha Khaek. So off we went in the pouring rain which felt like little sharp blades going 90km. After our ponchos failed us we managed to find full on water proof pants and tops which helped protect us from the rain. We had scootered 130km when we hit our first unforeseen event. Our scooter started to make a crunching sound. We had almost made it to the top of the hill when "crunk crunk", our scooter died. We had no choice but to walk the bike to the top of the hill and proceed by jumping on and roll down the hill. Luckily at the bottom of the hill there was a tiny village. We walked with our scooter trying to find a bike shop. After many hopeless attempts at speaking sign language to the locals who could not speak a word of english we managed to find a little man that had the tools to fix our bike. We paid the man and off we went to finish the remaining 50km to Kong Lo Cave.

Despite our breakdown, we were making really good timing and thought we would get there early afternoon but we were wrong. We did not count on unforeseen event two. As Owen and I were riding the water level around us started to get higher and higher until it was on the road. Children were swimming in the road when we started to think 'can our bike make it to the other side'. We were considering riding the bike through the water when a local man came speeding up next to us in his wooden longboat or float (it was not much of a boat to NZ standards). So the solution was easy put the scooter in the float and we will sail the scooter up the flooded road. Once again we did not think that it would take us long to get to a place we could continue our journey. However after sailing in the float for 20km we began to think when this would end? Unforeseen event 3 decided to rear its ugly head when we floated right into a fence and the bike fell into the water. Owen and the driver went diving off the boat to try and catch it but too late the motor went under. They managed to get it in the float and we were off again. We started to feel hopeful when we saw the dry road edging nearer and nearer.

So after paying the boatman far to much money for our little episode we started up the bike and we were off. Thankfully the bike worked… for now. Thats when unforeseen event 4 came alive. We were just getting back into our scooter ride when we came to yet another flooded road. Once again we put the scooter into a float and Owen and a bunch of local Laos boys pushed it across the flooded river/ road. I caught a ride on a back of a tractor until that decided to die so I walked the rest of the way. We made it across and than we went to start our scooter and of course it decided not to want to work. Hello unforeseen event number 5! We were in the middle of no where literally trapped with no way of going back. However, the locals were more than willing to help us and after spending an hour and a half trying to get it to start up, she came alive!!

After paying the locals for their time we were off again silently praying to ourselves that there were no more floated roads and the bike would not die. Nightfall was edging near and our scooter light did not work (we did not think we would need one). Thankfully we did not have any more unforeseen events! Our bike made it to the Kong Lo Cave just when it got dark. Because of the flooding there was no electricity so we spent the evening with candle light and a much deserved warm Beerlao. It took us six hours to travel 50km. The whole experience was funny and well worth the story! After all isn't this what travelling is about? I would definitely do the loop again!

We meet a group of people exchanged stories and continued to wait for the cave to reopen from all the flooding. Thankfully the day we scheduled to leave Kong Lo Cave opened and we were able to take a boat through it. I thought it was awesome, the cave was huge and to be able to motor through it was great!

After our loop experience we headed to Don Det which is located down the bottom of Laos. More known to tourists as 4000 islands which links Cambodia and Laos together. We spent two weeks on Don Det which is way longer than we had anticipated. The island itself is just so chilled out. We stayed at the happy bar and meet a London dude called Manni. He has settled on the island for three years so he took us under his wing and showed us the sites. One afternoon a group of us boated to an island in-between Cambodia and Laos and watched the sunset.

With only one day left on our visas we arrived in Cambodia!