We stopped off at Vientiane, the capital, for one night on our way down to the 4000 islands. Vientiane sits on the border with Thailand, the Mekong separating the two countries and three months before we were sitting on the opposite side in Nong Khai. We settled for the first hotel in our guide book, it wasn't the best but we only needed it for one night. We found a restaurant serving bacon cheeseburgers and couldn't resist. After a good nights sleep we had a d...

Once we had recovered form The Gibbon Experience our aim was to head to the south of Laos. We decided to take the slow boat again down to Luang Prabang, this time we were joined by the two guys who were with us for the Gibbon Experience. Unfortunately it is was a bit chilly the first day on the boat, as we arrived in Pak Beng it started to rain. Kate ran ahead to see if the hotel that was recommended to us had rooms, luckily it did and it was cheap, 50,000 Kip (a...

From Vang Vieng we had to travel up to Huay Xai as we had booked on to the gibbon experience. We decided to take a minibus back to Luang Prabang; the roads were very windy and the driver had his foot to the floor the whole way, needless to say we all felt a bit sick after a few hours. We stayed for a night in Luang Prabang and then got the slow boat up the Mekong river. The boat takes two days to reach Huay Xai but it is a much better way to travel than taking ...

Our next stop in Laos was Vang Vieng, made famous for tubing, we were heading there with our friends we met in Luang Prabang. For those that don't know tubing is where you hire an inner tube and float down the Nam Song river, the only difference with Vang Vieng is that the river is lined with bars and rope swings. As you can imagine this is a recipe for disaster and due to the amount of deaths by people swinging off rope swings into swallow water (death toll last...

So from Muang Khua we were heading to Luang Prabang, we decided to stay with the group we were with as it made the travelling entertaining and we didn't know what the buses would be like. We got a minibus to Udomxai and then unfortunately the next bus was full, so we had to wait around for 4 hours to get the next one. We finally arrived in Luang Prabang and we searched for a cheap hotel with the group we were travelling with. Most of the hotels here were full or ...