After a quiet day yesterday, we decided to book onto a Kayaking trip for today. We got picked up at 9.00am and drove 45 minutes to where we would get into the kayak on the Nam Khan river. After a very quick lesson from William our instructor off we went in our two manner. We paddled for about 10 minutes down the river before coming to a set of waterfalls where we got out and spent the next hour swimming in the pools at the bottom of the falls. The place was stu...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> Day two on what now has been renamed the "refugee boat", we had been upgraded! Rachael wanted to get to the boat early to try and get the best seats, and fortunately it paid off. There were about 10 benches at the back of the boat with extra leg room and cushions with the remainder of the boat full of the same hard benches as yesterday. This journey was much more bearable, we were ...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> At 8.00 am this morning we were ready for our first border crossing, we are leaving Thailand for a while and heading to Laos. We had heard various horror stories about the immigration process but we passed through in no time. We firstly boarded a small boat to take us from Chaing Khong across the Mekong river to the Loas border town of Huay Xai. As you could see the town from across the rive...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> So its the day of the big trip and we're not too confident of how well this is going to go...... Tom was still persistent on the bus option but with no sign we boarded the pick-up, well that's not strictly true, we waited 45 minutes until the 25 people it could cram in arrived (this is on one normal Toyota pick-up). The first journey went fine and around an hour later we arrived for our &qu...

<!-- @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } --> Getting used to using the public buses we opted to stay in a small town further up the Mekong river named Chiang Saen. A good bus ride got us there for 9am but we found it really difficult to find a room. The majority of those in the book were closed due to the season but we managed to get a nice room with a Thai family. There wasn't much to the town although we did have a really nice meal ...