So we completed our elephant ride and jungle trek in Chiang Mai a few days ago. It was pretty amazing, defo one to remember!!!

Firstly, we went to the butterfly farm and orchid farm, which was nice but bit tame, then we had a short trek through the greenest expanse we've ever seen to the elephant camp, you can see from the pics! The elephants were really placid but we felt a bit bad as the whole thing seemed a bit cruel, but I think it's maybe just because that's not the way things are at home. We got to ride on the elephants back and the driver sat on his head to steer her in right path. We had bought a bunch of bananas for her there and she just stuck her trunk up behind her to us and we fed her some! Very cool!

Then we had a trek through the jungle, a 'non-tourist' trek, which was bit hairy, we seen some funky creatures, including a MASSIVE spider, which doesnt look that big in the foto but was actually bigger than your face!! After we trekked for about an hour in the dead heat, we came to a waterfall that we could shower in, so we all jumped in and got a good wash, but Matt dropped one of his walking shoes and it just floated off down the waterfall, so he had to flip flop it the rest of the way I also got bitten by something in the jungle, I don't know what is was tho cos I brushed it off before I looked, but it's pretty huge and my arm swole up and some guys told me it looked like a spider bite!!! eeek!!

Then after that, when we were all knackered enough, it was time to white water raft!! Although because it's wet season, and the water was so high, we had to skip the waterfall part of it, so it wasn't as scary as it should have been; but saying that, Matt did fall in!!

So it was a great day all round! We are now up in Vientiane in Laos and it's our second day here. We went to take a walk around the city and see a few sights but I noticed that all the local people kept staring at me, really obviously , and we figured out it was because I had bare shoulders, which is really not the done thing here; women must cover their shoulders completely and their legs to their knees, so we just went back to the hotel, cos it was freaking us out!lol Instead, we rented bikes today, and cycled round the sights, which there only was a couple of. It's much nicer here again than in Chiang Mai, so if this pattern continues, things are looking up!!

So tomorrow morning, we are getting the bus to Vang Vieng to go tubing, which basically involves getting on a rubber ring in the Mekong river, and floating down the river past the 35 bars on it. When you want to stop off for a drink, you give the bar tender a shout, and he throws out a rope and you pull yourself in!! Should be good fun and chance to meet a load of new people, we already met a few here last night from Scotland, England and Belguim. They gave us probably the best tip, in that the tip for eating out etc is already built in here, and tipping isn't really the done thing here, which would have been good to know and we only tipped a place 6% other day, we set down the money on the table and bolted from the restaurant!! So now we don't feel so bad lol

Hope you are all enjoying the updates and we should have some new pics up of our Laotian adventures pretty soon!

Lots of love

Nicola and Matt