The border crossing was painless but figuring out the money was a little bit of a headache, everything is in thousands of Kip ( at time of writing this it's about 12,600 to the pound) so our first tuk tuk ride was in the region of 40,000 kip how the F*&k do we work it out, only just got used to Bhat.

We planned to get the slow boat from the border to Luang Prabang which meant 2 whole days on a boat with an over night in the village of Pak Beng. The boat was due to leave at 11am but wont actually go untill it's packed to practically sinking, a french women ended up kicking up a stink at 12 and somehow got hold of a huge bag of kip belonging to the capatin and threatened a mutiny if we didn't leave in 10 minutes, well it seemed to do the trick and we were off, very slowly, down the mekong on our way to Pak Beng.

During the journey Steve got soaked by a leaking tap, some French guy jumped the gun and thought he could fix it and ended up riping the pipe out p*ssing water all over the floor which meant Steve and Roger had to stand most of the way. I was on a very uncomfortable excuse for a bench and oblivious to the chaos that was going on at the back of the boat. Pak Beng was a plesant enough village we learnt some Laos, got free Lao Lao whiskey (euh!) and we had to sleep when the generator shut down at 11pm. Some people shared their guest house room with rats that night so we were the lucky ones.

2nd day of the journey and all started well, we had a differnt boat! We turned the back of the boat into a games room with cards, chess and back gammon, looks like it will be an easier day.... The Mekong river isn't the clearest more of a muddy brown, there's alot of rocks and random currents one of which must have resulted in our new boat losing it's rudder!! Excellent news we're 4 hours into the 7 and we are apparently stranded, the captain has jumped ship to find another boat and it will be dark soon. After an hour the captain comes back and we get tugged a little way down the river where we believe they will try and fix the rudder, ten passengers get off the boat to help the one Laos guy pull the boat to shore. We are then told we'll be on the other boat which is half the size (there's about 120 of us) so all bags are taken off and we bundle on the new boat, i end up sitting on loads of back packs in the engine area with diesel smoke and an incredible racket thankfully i didn't have to stay there long as someone took pity and told me of a spare seat!! Thank God!!

We arrived in Luang Prabang in the dark and the captain had no light to guide the boat so i was saying my prayers for a while, he got a round of applause and the search for accommodation began.

Due to being late in and 120 other people rushing to look for somewhere to stay we struggled, no room at the inn for us, or there was room but at a stupid cost of 50+ dollars, we weren't that hungry and tired yet so we decided to press on and managed to find somewhere, not amazing but not breaking the bank either.

Our stay in Luang Prabang was ok not quite what i was expecting, there's a heavy feel of package tourism and not a lot of character, it seems to have been swept away by the onslaught of tourism and the dollar bills. That said the waterfalls we saw were beautiful and the night market and food stalls around the area were really good.

There was 12 of us going to Vang Vieng so we all decided to hire a mini bus to take us the 6hrs there. Everyone is in high spirits and looking forward to Christmas.