4000 Islands - well, we stayed on one One major highlight for Liz and I about travelling south in Laos was the prospect of a "sleeper bus" to take us through the night down to the river crossing to Don Det. Once we had finally been picked up by the bus in Vang Vieng (after it drove passed us about 3 times!) we headed to Vientiene where we would have about 2 hours to kill.We weren't too fussed about missing this out as it struck us as just another ...

Vang Vieng - a Pleasant Surprise! As a group we hadn't been particularly sure that Vang Vieng was for us - the main focus for most others going there was to go tubing down the Mekong and generally party - this all sounds OK but it's often described as an Asian Magaluf.It was much to our surprise that we found a whole brick house that we could rent for the four of us overlooking the river and spectacular mountains run by a very chilled Norwegian.We enjoyed some...

Lovely Luang Prabang We staggered up the jetty and started searching, as Liz mentioned, for a less crazy guesthouse.Based on the benchmark of the last one, this wasn't too hard!We stumbled across a decent enough guesthouse set back slightly from the river at a price of about £4.20 per night for the room.Despite a slightly musty smell in the room (and a cockroach we later found) it had a double bed, fan and private bathroom.In need of food we set off to find t...

Pirates of the Mekong After what seemed like a very quick month our time in Thailand came to an end and we hopped back on the mini-bus to take us north to the border at Chiang Khong.Several friends had advised us to take the slow boat into Laos promising great scenery, a different way of travelling but most of all lots of fun so we hoped we would meet a good group to enjoy the trip with.The border town was as quiet and as empty of tourists as much of Thailand ...