HOLY s***, first words spoken as I step outside the airport of Hanoi. We have been pushed, pulled, tormented, harrassed and yelled at, and we haven't even left the airport yet!! SARS, obviously it has taken its toll on Vietnamese tourism. We have managed to find ourselves a very nice hotel for $4 a night!! It's crazy, everyone is dropping their prices because there are just no tourists around, I feel like we are the only westerners here. It's good becau...

A few days since I wrote last. After a day in .... tourist mecca, scaling limestone cliffs in search of the magnificent caves, we decided to kayak down river to the capital of Laos, Vientiane. A very peaceful tuk-tuk drive .... took us to the start of our 4 hour kayaking adventure. We get into our kayaks and put on our helmets ... we are lucky we booked with this particular guest house as we actually got helmets .. the other two people on our adventure did...

After 3 days in Luang Prabang, during Song Kran, it is time to leave! We decide to head South towards a place called .... a tourist mecca apparently, but famous for limestone cliffs that jut out of the barren land. Luang Prabang has been great, although we found ourselves spending lots of money on western luxuries, like cereal and pizza!! Worth it though. We watched the sun setting over the town from the top of Mount Phu Si ... beautiful. We tried our h...

Laos, interesting experience to get here, but very beautiful so far. We left the 'comfort' of our guest house in Chiang Rai and caught a bus to the bordering town between Thailand and Laos. Armed with a bag full of soaking wet clothes, our attempt to airdry them wasn't pulled off with any sort of success!! We stayed overnight in the border town and the next day we caught a tuk-tuk to the customs at the border. Little did we know that this was the tim...

Welcome to LAOS. So far what we have seen has been very beautiful, but we had one hell of a time getting here! We left the 'comfort' of our guest house in Chiang Rai, and caught a bus part way up the remainder of Northern Thailand. Where the bus stopped we had to catch a Tuk-Tuk to the border crossing, in order to get on our boat. Well, little did we know that it was the annual 'Song Kran' festival, a festival that involves extreme amounts of water ...