Welcome to Vang Vieng!!! Probably the wierdest little town we have visited so far. I will get into more detail about this after a recap of the past two days.

Yesterday we gave ourselves a little bit of a lie in. Jess and I went to pick up some smoothies from the market right next to our guesthouse - freshly made there in front of us - deeeelish!! We then headed out to rent some bikes. Our guidebook had mentioned that the Tribal Museum was shut on a Sunday whereas another one said it was open all week...we decided to ask and the little bird (actually the name of our guesthouse) said it should be open. We made the trek out of the city to the museum and not only is the museum always shut on a sunday, its been shut for several months for renevation!! Cheers.

We cycled back to the city and then decided to head for two of the temples further out of the city. We hit Wat San Duok first, took a quick look around and then set off again for Wat Umong. As it was nearing 2pm and all we'd eaten was the smoothie we stopped for lunch at a restaurant on the side of the road. The menu was completely in Thai. We tried to ask the girl what she had and she said "noodles"....three times noodle with pork it was then. She came back to us saying something about how they didnt have chicken (not quite sure what she was on about as we clearly didnt order chicken). What we ended up getting was a bowl of noodle soup with pork...AND chicken. Cheapest meal we've had in thailand so far!

Off to Wat Umong next where the statue of the fasting buddha is held. It's more of a park so we wandered around a bit and found the statue - pretty wierd as all the others ones we've seen are of fat buddhas! We then found ourselves walking through some little housing areas which was obviously where some monks lived...woops!

We headed back to the city and stopped by Wat Pra Singh, the main temple of the city. It was all flashy and gold (like most of the other temples). After being hassled by a student asking us to fill in some questionaire that we had issues understanding, we grabbed a drink before heading back. We cycled down some roads where a market was being set up and just sort of looked at other temples as we cycled by. Then back to little bird to get ready for the long journey to Laos.

We got picked up at 6.30pm (as planned)...we then stopped at the office to fill in some forms and actually left at around 7.05pm (more or less as planned). Then we went to get petrol, food, i dunno what else the driver was up to before finally we ended up back at the main office at 7.45pm to pick up another passenger - no longer on schedule! We were also hoping for our 13 seat minibus to be fairly empty but we werent very lucky and every seat was filled...poop. We finally left Chiang Mai nearer to 8. The bus driver turned off all the lights in the van (while we were trying to read) and turned on his tunes. Ironically the first song of the night was "tonights gonna be a good night" by the black eyed peas. Great choice mate.

The night actually went surprisingly fast. Jess and I were taking up the back two seats and sleeping in some very odd positions which were rather comfortable in fact. Before we knew it, it was 5.30am and we were on the Thai side of the friendship bridge. We were given our free breakfast (two measley pieces of toast with jam and butter) before we were given our forms for the border. For some reason the Lao people seem to like the Japanese, Koreans and the Swiss so Jess and I didn't have to buy a visa! Woop 60 Dollars back into Mr. Pocket!

The next part of the journey was odd....getting onto a different bus to get to Thai immigration...crossing the "friendship bridge" in the same bus to get to Laos immigration and then getting on another bus once we had crossed into Laos to take us to Vientienne. We thought this was it but booooy were we wrong. We arrived in Vientienne and they told us to stay on the bus. They drove in a circle and told us to get off. Then we got on another bus....drove around a bit more and just as we were getting cumfy, hey! Lets change bus again! Finally we made onto the last bus and waited around for absolutely ages before finally heading for Vang Vieng which we finally reached about an hour and a half later than expected. Not so bad i suppose.

So Vang Vieng. This is meant to be tourist central, but no one speaks english. All the restaurants in the tiny area that this place seems to cover are either playing back to back episodes of friends or the simpsons. Also, every single restaurant serves the exact same food, at the exact same prices. Our original "treehouse" hostel didnt live up to our expectations so we went on a hunt for a new one after some lunch. We found a very simple one with a massive room and a pretty crazy power shower - cant complain there!

We chilled out in the restaurant under our hostel watching 4 or 5 episodes of friends before getting up to look for some dinner. Tomorrow we will be hitting the river for a bit of tubing so stay tuned!

xx

Emma