Monday Today was to be a boring but essential admin day as we needed to get our documents together to apply for our Chinese visa. We took ourselves to a nearby cafe where we spent a couple of hours eating cakes & drinking amazing tea & coffee whilst we printed our life stories. The cafe made the most beautiful cakes and I've definitely got some ideas for ones I wanna try to make when I get home. It was set up by a lady who wanted to provide an employmen...

Well I would do a lovely blog about Don Det but it would probably be the most boring blog ever!! Sleep, drink, eat, hammock, cycle, sleep, hammock, eat, drink. Etc etc. As that suggests we didn't do an awful lot and that was the plan. We caught up on blogs & photos from the Stray journeys, we hired bicycles to ride around the island (a whole 1hr!). We did cycle to the next island as there is a bridge that adjoins the two. The 1st attempt at this wasnt great...

Thursday 22 - Vientiane to Tad Leuk So we waited & waited & waited but the bus hasn't come. Was this Laos time (everything is infinitely slower paced here) or had they forgotten us!!! While we were selecting the tour for the North East of the country and found Stray we looked through the others they offered. We knew we needed to head to the border with Cambodia and aim to cross it in 2 weeks time. The leg of Laos is similar to the leg of Italy only on o...

Wednesday 14th - Luang Prabang to Nong Khiaw We met the rest of the people that we were due to be on the bus with for this tour. 2 of people work for the company but hadn't done this tour before so were checking it out. It only operates in dry season and this one was the 1st of the year. That left Aussie Alan and two lovely sisters Vicky & Becky from Oxford! Along with Xay our guide & Tun the driver. The first stretch was a short journey of 3 hours int...

We booked a bus/boat combo ticket to take the 2 day slow boat journey from Thailand into Laos. The bus ride to the border town was a bit arduous but we got there & filled in the immigration forms. The company we used were a bit cheeky as we were told we could pay dollars, she said only baht. Took our dollars to exchange into baht then delivered our dollars back at the port minus a $10 each for their 'service charge'. Cheeky b*****s. Hey ho, we left Thailand &...