We made it, just! Our 9am bus from Nong Khiaw wasn't full, so in Laos fashion it didn't leave and became the 11am bus. Eventually we were on our way complete with baskets of chickens and ducks strapped to the roof.... We got into Luang Prabang with 20 mins to race across town on the back of a tuk tuk and just made the 2pm bus to Vientiane. One thing you have to give Laos is its bloody stunning. The journey was all through the mountains with amazing views (igno...

So we never got round to leaving Nong Khiaw after Tash picked up an impressive bug.... Three days later she's made it out of our room for the first time since we tried to get the bus. Hoping now to get the day bus back to Luang Prabang tomorrow and with any luck straight through to Vientiane the same day. There are definitely worse places to be stuck for a few days!

We originally booked two nights in Luang Prabang. The day we arrived we realised we hadn't really planned anything for Laos, short of knowing we needed to fly from Vientiane on the 24th to get our Vietnamese visas. I wasn't prepared for just how little information there is in Laos, being able to find next to no information online about buses or even places to go. We thought of travelling East and going to phonsavan and veing xai, but it soon became apparent that...

Friday morning (16th) we got the morning bus up to Nong Khiaw, a bumpy, windy and beautifully stunning 3 hour drive from Luang Prabang. The 75000 kip (£6) fare seemed rather steep after the cheap travel prices we got used to in Thailand, however when we arrived we realised it was worth every penny. Nong Khiaw is a tiny town, with two roads nestled in between stunning mountains. I may have had a *slight* strop when we arrived at the guest house we had booked aft...

We decided to book an organised trip to get us from Chiang Mai to Luang Prabang, as for some bizarre reason it came out far cheaper than doing it ourselves. A quick 5 hours in a mini van got us to the border town of Chiang Khong. We booked in with the other gaggle of 20+ tourists and tottered off to our free dinner. We felt brilliantly old saying no to free tequila and would have stayed smug if we had done the same again the next night..... In the morning we we...