After the 'experience' of the previous bus journey and the trauma of having to try and console Sara throughout, the prospect of heading South didn't seem that inviting. Therefore rather than endure the reverse bus journey of 18+ hours back to Vientiane, then at least another 14 hours to get to Four Thousand Islands, we decided to break it up with an internal flight and a stop off in central Laos visiting a 'must see' cave.

The local flight was only an hour long...however after it we were not sure if we preferred travelling by air or road! To be fair it was always going to be a turbulent affair since it was a dinky type of plane, the kind with propellers on each wing which we are obviously not common with. However even in light of this, the most unnerving part was the descent since the latter part of it felt like we were in a nose dive...not one for the faint hearted!

Anyway onwards and downwards, was a 6 hour bus journey to Tha Khaek, which lonely planet quotes as "a pleasant base" for visiting Kong Lo cave. On this advice we arrived there late evening in preparation for a cave adventure the next day. Once again this was a fail on lonely planets behalf...conveniently located a mere 200km from the cave, the guest house we stayed at in Tha Khaek is set up to charge extortionate prices for transport (more than double the normal going rate) to get to the cave (local transport takes too long to make it a day trip). With tourist activity very sparse in this area, to put it bluntly, they had us by the balls. So rather than surrender to paying through the nose, we bit the bullet and continued our journey...we didn't want to go the cave anyway :-(

As you may have guessed by now, bus travel in Laos is quite lethargic and very time consuming. Until now we had only witnessed the ever so common sight of buses on the side of the road either broken down or replacing a tyre - this time it was our turn with a bald tyre kindly pointed out by the police. Combining this unscheduled pit stop with the numerous other stops (mainly for food so it's not all bad!) only contributed to being further delayed and as a result our great journey south required another stop off - this time at Pakse. In the UK there would be people moaning all over the place, but given the friendly laid-back nature of the Lao people, you never see anyone complaining which is quite refreshing.

So we continued into our third day of travelling the next morning and eventually after an hour flight, over 17 hours on a bus and a small boat ride, we made it to Don Det!

Well I guess you want to know something about this place now...at a time where there is scorching sun back home, it seems our worlds have been reversed since we were greeted by typical drizzly british weather. Given the only means of getting around is on mud/dirt tracks, it was like being at Glastonbury again! Not to be be true to our nationality though and let the weather dictate our mood, we proceeded to explore the island. However it didn't really work out when darkness came as we were slipping around in the mud in our flip flops with only the light of the phone to guide us; where the light would instantly attract a plethora of bugs, so a bit of a catch twenty-two situation.

Nonetheless we managed to arrange a day of kayaking which incorporated visiting a couple of waterfalls and a sighting of the rare Irrawaddy dolphins. The guys sales pitch included showing us a video of the current days group and someone capsizing - this was not a good tactic as petrifying Sara was not the way to get her into a kayak! However after I haggled a discount, and after realising this was the only way we were able to see the dolphins, she nervously came round to the idea. Money conquers fear!

The next day we hit the water and being a first time kayaker I didn't really know what I was doing, but surely it couldn't be that difficult - just stick your oar in and push. So I thought, but clearly our method wasn't perfected since we were consistently falling behind. The most enjoyable bit (other than seeing the dolphins) was when going through small rapids/whirlpools and barely avoiding capsizing; however where the Mekong opened up and flowed quite calmly, it was so much more hard work than we expected. All in all though it was good fun but I don't think we will be doing it again in a rush - we were happy to reach the end as we were pretty exhausted and burnt to a crisp (even Sara) thanks to the sun deciding to come out and play on this day.

So that's Laos. A mixed bag ranging from breathtaking scenery to horrendous bus journeys, chilled out and friendly people to the pretty unadventurous/unauthentic cuisine and obviously I cannot close without mentioning the experience with the elephants. Next we move onto Cambodia, so stay tuned as who knows what is in store for us (chances are if you have followed us this far already, you're going to continue to anyway!)

Xx