We got the bus directly from Nong Khai to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, as we already had our visas, and the boarder crossing was straight forward. The bus ticket only cost about £1, it cost us more to get a tuk-tuk the other side for the short ride to our hotel! Vientiane is such a laid back place, especially for a capital city, no-one is in any rush and in one restaurant we saw a camp bed set up so the waitress could have a nap when she had nothing to do! We spent Saturday morning at the morning market which sells everything from souvenirs to fridges, we found the Lao people to be very friendly and everything very cheap.

We spent the rest of the weekend with Melissa and Muriel and had a lovely time with them. We visited the COPE National Rehabilitation Centre with them on Saturday afternoon. A little known fact about Laos is that it was bombed heavily by the American forces (2 million tons of bombs) in what is known as the secret war, at the time of the war in Vietnam. These bombs were cluster bombs which break up in the air and then scatter bomblets or bombies about the size of tennis balls over a large area and these then explode upon landing. The problem is between 10% and 30% don't explode and are left in the ground and are known as UXO's (unexploded ordinance). Unfortunately farmers often disturb them while ploughing their land, or kids find them and start playing with them only to find their new toy then blows up. The unlucky ones are killed, the 'lucky' ones lose a limb or two. This centre helps rehabilitate amputee victims who are unfortunate enough to be injured by a UXO, and provides them with false limbs. The visitors centre there was very informative on the work being done to rehabilitate victims and also to safely locate and remove UXO's. As we were leaving a couple of patients, each with a leg missing were sat in the grounds.

On Monday we had a city tour visiting a couple of Buddhist Temples, Pha That Luang - a large golden stupa which is a national icon of Laos, and Patuaxi - a sort of replica of France's Arc de Triomphe from the time of France's occupation. Laos became communist in 1975 but the country seems freer than other communist countries such as China, and the expected police and army presence was almost non-existent. There appears to be little crime, in Vientiane the street lights often weren't working and yet small children played unsupervised in the streets after dark. Tourism has only opened up in the last 10 years or so, April is also the beginning of the low season so is was nice to find Laos was not overrun with tourists.

We flew to Luang Prabang, a city nestled where the Khan river flows into the Mekong river. It's a wonderful, charismatic city which remains very traditional, helped by it's UNESCO World Heritage status and apparent 11.30pm curfew! Like in Vientiane, Monks are a common site and usually walk in groups of two or three carrying umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun. Umbrellas are in fact very common accessories and young ladies are often seen riding motorbikes or mopeds holding an umbrella in one hand to shade the sun off them. A tour took us to another couple of temples and the Palace Museum, the former home of the Lao royal family. We climbed Mount Phu Si (a hill rather than a mountain) to watch the sun set over the city and descended to find the wonderfully colourful night market in full swing.

The following morning we took a boat up the Mekong river to the Pak Ou caves. The caves themselves were rather ordinary limestone caves filled with about 4000 Buddha images (we didn't count them!) but the boat ride was very scenic. The Buddha images are mainly wooden and are gradually being eaten away by termites though Buddhist believers bring new ones when they visit. We stopped at Pak Ou village on the other side of the river for lunch and took a walk through the village seeing many primitive houses. We also stopped at another small village where they make rice wine and whisky. Some of the bottles of whisky had snakes or scorpions in them and are apparently types of traditional medicine!

One morning we got up early to see lines of Buddhist monks in orange robes walking barefoot through the streets in silence collecting alms from local Buddhists. In the mornings the local market selling all kinds of food products is in full swing. We saw the expected things like fruit, vegetables, rice, eggs, fish and meat. All raw meat is laid out on tables in the heat with plenty of flies around though this is the norm in many countries, and I'm sure its where the restaurants buy from so it can't be too bad as we're still alive yet! We also saw the unexpected such as buffalo brains, barbecued squirrels, steamed insects, snakes and buffalo hooves. There was also some live produce mainly chickens and monitor lizards with their legs lied together, the latter we learned is actually illegal. You also see in a lot of places here, people selling small birds in cages not much bigger than the birds themselves. These are bought by people to then be released, we think it's something the locals do for good luck but a number of tourists were buying them too. Although it seems a nice thing to do for the birds, you are only encouraging them to catch more to replace them so we didn't buy any.