Sabaidee everybody, it's that time again!

Three weeks since the last blog and Laos has been well and truly travelled through. Quite a difference of a blog seemingly every week back in South America but hey, we just got lazy! Laos is going to be very close to winning the award for best country by the end of this trip we think and i hope that comes out in the following!

Back on 1st March we had our first glimpse of the Mekong river as we crossed it from Chiang Khong to Huay Xai in Laos. Over the next three weeks we got to know the river pretty well, but at the time the tiny boat running extremely low in the muddy brown waters worried us more than anything. We bought our 30 day visa and wandered up the ramp to the nearest guesthouse and plonked our stuff down before wandering back to the visa office to change some money to Kip.

In Laos there are three currencies in constant use; Thai Baht, Lao Kip and US Dollar. This makes for some very hurried sums virtually all the time as you try and work out what currency will give you the most favourable price. Most small costs like food are wholly in Kip though. We had quite a lot of cash with us because we had been told (wrongly it turned out) that there is only 1 ATM in Laos in Vientiane, which was about 15 days away at this time. There are actually ATMs in almost every town and you can get Kip out for a small charge.

Anyway, that evening we had more pizza because we still felt pretty ill (if you remember i got ill first around the 24th February!) The next day we got a minibus North to Luang Nam Tha along a very nice recently sealed road where we were hoping very optimistically to do some trekking. As it turned out we just weren't strong enough and it was bloody freezing, I love the cold, especially after some of the places we've been to but even I ended up sleeping with all my clothes on (Alex was not happy). Another reason the trekking was starting to appeal less is because the more we looked into it the more the term Ecotourism began to look like a contradiction in terms. Everyone wants to go see the indiginous tribes and scenery that no one else has seen, but as soon as companies run tours to those places an impact has been made. I'm not saying that there are no treks without the local tribes best interests at heart but I think we had different expectations to the reality. Either way we stayed up in the hills for 2 days and tried to get better, by this point Alex was but i was getting worse again so we stocked up on some awful tasting pills. Oh, and the scenery up there was spectacular to say the least!

Another very strange part to Laos is the almost total lack of sprung mattresses. The first bed we stayed in in Huay Xai was a mattress but had a wooden frame beneath the material as if to disguise the fact that you're sleeping on wood! Very strange, but good for the back.

So onto Uodomxai on a very local bus. Imagine an old school bus with two seats down one side and one seat down the other side, every seat is taken. Now put loads of bags of rice, potatoes and whatever else you want in the aisle. Put people sitting on these. By the driver is the gear box which handily has material over it. Imagine a family of four, one being a very small baby, all sitting on this. Then put me and Alex almost sitting on them and the gear box for four hours. Local enough? Got to say in hind sight we loved every minute of it though. I was being a bit of a girl and moaning that i was ill so Alex had the worst seat with the gear stick between her legs (needless to say the driver loved it!) what a superstar. The stop at Uodomxai was only for one night to break up a long journey to Nong Khiaw where we hoped to get a boat down to Luang Prabang.

The small baby also reminds me that there are kids literally everywhere and that the people in Laos are some of the happiest we have met! Wherever we go, the cry of Sabaidee (Lao for hello) starts ringing around us from smiling kids. Whereas in Thailand or Cambodia they may then put out their hands to beg, in Laos they are just interested and happy to see someone different. A part of the Lao language that we found quite amusing is their affirmative answer which sounds like Ergh, ergh, ergh and is said at least three times very loudly!!

The next day im still ill with an upset stomach and looking forward to another bumpy ride to Nong Khiaw in a minibus. The hill villages we pass on the windy road are bamboo huts one hut deep from the road with the driver equally likely to have to slam on the brakes for a kid, a chicken, pig or cow. When we arrived in Nong Khiaw we were blown away. The village is split by the Nam Ou river and connected by a very tall, old bridge. The river has carved some very dramatic scenery from the surrounding limestone hills. We stayed in our cheapest room yet for about a pound fifty a night for a bed and a mosquito net right on the river at Sunset Guesthouse. The next day we checked out the boat to Luang Prabang and saw two absolutely packed boats leave, which didnt fill us with confidence. We hired some bikes and explored the surrounding caves for the afternoon. On the 7th March we luckily caught a relatively empty boat to Luang Prabang, we think it was the beer run. Relatively empty is not to say comfortable as for the next 6 and a half hours we were perched on wooden planks trying to enjoy (and i know i keep sayig it but it's true) the best scenery we've seen so far. The river was mill pond still with only our boat on it for kms at a time and bewildered looking water buffalo staring at us from the bank, at one point our boat had to dodge a swimming buffalo. The journey gave us a real insight into how much of a life line the rivers are to the Laos people. We saw families bathing in it, washing food, catching fish, running turbines for electricity, and even panning for something (i still dont think it was gold but who knows.) And whenever they saw us a friendly wave and a shouted greeting would be instantaneously given. It was probably the best trip we've taken so far, apart from the lack of toilets which Alex didn't enjoy).

By this time i was better, but being ill makes you think pretty rigorously about hygiene and one point to mention is that it is extremely difficult to find a sink anywhere, let alone one that has soap! It made us wonder how we didnt get ill earlier, fingers crossed it wont happen again!

Luang Prabang is a slightly more cosmopolitan (if there is such a thing in Laos) city/town and has a huge French influence. From the old colonnial buildings right down to baguettes everywhere, Luang Prabang is a great mix of Laos and Western culture. We visited the Wat at the top of the hill in the centre of town and mulled over how much we could afford to spend at the night market for two days before moving on to Vang Vieng. It was the best night market in the whole of Laos and Alex just wished she had bought more! It isn't really that expensive but our UK habits of wine, nice coffees and inidian curries, did make it a little bit too close to home (and costly). We didn't visit the waterfalls but others highly recommended them.

Vang Vieng is a small village set alongside the Nam Song river that just happens to have been chosen as the home of tubing! Tubing involves taking a huge tractor tyre inner and sitting in it as you go down the river back to town from the place where the tuk-tuk dropped you off. Oh, and theres the possibility to drink beer and jump into the river from huge swings the whole way down. Needless to say that this appeals to the 16-18 American market quite a bit and there are hordes of hung-over people watching Friends for hours in the bars on the main street. We stayed in a beautiful bamboo bungalow by the river and hired some bikes to explore the surrounds again one day and then took on the tubing the day after. We learnt in the bungalow that Alex may well give off an attractive scent to cockroaches as one ran up her leg in the shower (they always find her). To her credit nothing got broken in the ensuing chaos, not even my ear drums. The beer here is called beer Lao (original) and comes at about 50 pence for a big bottle. The day started off quite relaxed, listening to Bob Marley whilst lazyily drifting between bars. By the time Alex (those of you who know her will know that her affinity to water is that of a cat) jumped off the biggest swing before i could muster up to courage! (Alex: 'Actually I had been daring Tom for 20 minutes to do the big handle bar swing, which was about 30ft high, and he chickened out. Therefore in my drunken state felt that I had to make him feel stupid and just got up and marched up the very unstable ladder. Naturally I was very proud of myself to see Tom's astonished face'). It was a great day out, and an extremely surreal one at that considering the location but be warned only for the young at heart, there is feeling of 'Spring Break' on the river.

We took a minibus down to Vientiane and we said bye to the hills of the north and the weather started to heat up again. We stayed on the main road over looking the Mekong which made for some great sunset views from the top of our guesthouse. We didn't do anything in Vientiane except stock up on cash again and..... some aerobics. Alex told me she was uncoordinated at it and that i wouldnt look stupid so i agreed to go along. Frankly, i dont know how a person is supposed to swing their arms and legs that quickly to a hyper speed garage version of "I will always love you" and not fall over from exhaustion. It was pretty funny to say the least, i think i even got the very serious instructor laughing at one point. Yes I was the uncoordinated and clearly very unfit one out of the two of us.

Having said that we wouldnt do any more over night trips we got an over night bus down to Pakse in the South. We arrived at 6 in the morning and seemed to be the only ones not going down to the four thousand islands because we wanted to see Champasak and Pakse but we hadnt decided in what order. We got off the bus and went and had a coffee. The reason we didnt know what to do was because we didnt have any firm information on how to get to Champasak from Pakse and visa versa. All we knew is that it was in between Pakse and the four thousand islands. Laos grows its own coffee and most vendors seem to brew it for a good few days so that it's similar to syrup when it gets served. Fresh milk is almost non existent in Laos and they have a love affair with condensed milk so that a coffee order will come as about 60% coffee, 30% condensed milk a.k.a rocket fuel. So at six in the morning after one such coffee we thought wed just go for it and jumped on a bus to Champasak. When the guy said Champasak, what he meant was the nearest part of the main road to Champasak so we had to get off and wait for a tuk-tuk to Champasak. What that tuk-tuk driver meant when HE said Champasak was the banks of the Mekong nearest Champasak where we had to get a ferry across. Once across, you guessed it we had to get another tuk-tuk to get to Champasak, which is a main road leading to its main attraction (Wat Phu) and not much else. Either way we'd made it and settled down to a couple of days of real Lao food and another cockroach hunt. We also hired some more bikes and rode to Wat Phu, a huge Khmer monument set into a hill. We then did the reverse journey back to Pakse and stayed there for a couple of days.

The reason we wanted to stay in Pakse was because of its proximity to the Bolaven Plateau where they grow coffee and tea and which has a series of beautiful waterfalls (yes more waterfalls). The only way to explore this area is by motorbike, which we did on the second day there. It's too late to worry parents because we did it and it was fine! The traffic was minimal and the roads wide. It was a really good day and nice not to be under pedal power for once. Photos are included.

On 20th March we took part of a tour, that would take us all the way into Cambodia eventually, to the four thousand islands and Don Dhet island in particular. Don Dhet is the type of place where you ask someone how long theyve been there and they look puzzled, pause and say a week? maybe more? When you have a bungalow with two hammocks out front over looking yet another breathtaking sunset over the Mekong you cant really expect much more. We spent three days exploring neighbouring Don Khon and swinging in hammocks. There is a beach at the north end of the island where a water buffalo took up residence every day waiting for people to wash her and pose for photos whilst getting drunk. A great way to see out the last few days in Laos. The island is very cheap but many creature comforts and standards are missing so only for the true traveller.

On 23rd March we got a ferry across the Mekong and a minibus to the border with Cambodia, Laos was so much more than we expected it to be (and we expected a lot) that we were sad to leave. The journey from the north to the south gave us an incredible view of an incredible country.

Sorry it was a long one, hope your eyes arnt too sore. Only a month and a half left now. Seems like we've been away forever but we have so much to get through in quite a small space of time.

Keep writing us comments, it's always nice to know whos reading and hope the weather isnt too bad!! Enjoy the photos!

Love Tom and Alex xxx