We had a lovely few days chilling out in Luang Prabang making sure our batteries were fully charged ready for our journey across the border into Vietnam. Sorting out our visa for Vietnam took a matter of minutes and once again, we were passport-less for a few days.

Luang Prabang is a lovely quiet town, it's a UNESCO world heritage site as well which makes it very popular, but it was still very quiet when we were there. We spent some time walking around the old town and the new and were amazed to see the number of guesthouses, restaurants, boutique hotels and shops - surely there can't ever be that many people here at one go?! It's a charming place though and the night market is a far cry from any other market we've visited in Asia so far - peaceful, gentle and laid back. Nobody hassled you to buy anything, or even look. It was lovely!

One morning, we got up at the crack of dawn to see the procession of Monks walking through the town collecting their alms. I'd been reading a bit on the internet about it before hand and it seems to be cutting a fine line between ancient tradition and tourist spectacle. I'm not sure why Luang Prabang is so famous for the alms ceremony as it happens everywhere there are monks (we saw some in Bagan, Myanmar when arrived early in the morning), but the non-buddhist community have managed to turn it into a tourist attraction, selling rice and other foods to people so that they can go and 'feed the monks'. The whole thing was a little bit off-putting to be honest, especially as some of them hadn't the decency to dress appropriately. I did read that the monks aren't happy with the whole thing, I'm not surprised, especially when there are reports of monks falling ill from bad food that they've been given by tourists (unexpectedly of course, they just bought it from someone else). They had talked about giving up the tradition, but apparently the government said that if they didn't carry on, they would get stand ins to carry on as a show. We hung around long enough to get a picture from the other side of the round and watch someone stand right in front of the procession flashing away on his camera. Did we see real monks? Who knows. But it's a shame to see the downside to tourism so apparently.

Randomly, Luang Prabang turned into a bit of a meeting place for us, not only did we meet back up with the German girls we'd met in Savannakhet (Krisi and Tine), but we also saw a blast from the past - a Spanish girl we'd met in Jaipur! Also, one evening when I was out with Krisi and Tine at a really nice bar called Utopia - a bit of a backpacker hangout - I saw a face that I recognised but couldn't place. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing trying to work it out, we realised that he was the first person we'd seen in our run down little guesthouse in Hpa-An (Myanmar)! I guess most people follow the same sort of route, but it's still odd being in a strange place and bumping into people you (sort of) know!

On our last day, we grabbed got a couple of seats on a minivan and headed out to the Kuang Si waterfalls nearby. They were beautiful, picture postcard type stuff. We didn't go for a swim, instead we hiked up to the top of the falls and then back down again. Hard work in places, but worth it, a nice bit of physical exercise for a change!!

That was it; we had our visa extension to give us time to get to the border, we had our Vietnam visa (3 months) and we'd seen everything we wanted to see. Time to make our break for the border.