Firstly, apologies for the long wait between posts. We have just been having too much fun!

Anyway, we left you all on our way to Bangkok. We only had a 2 day stop over and Brett was really unwell. Stinking heat did not help the fever and The Brett Sweats were in uncontrollable full flow. So Stacey braved Kosanh Road alone and went for supplies, but bar some pork sticks and pad thai street food, rotting in our room was about all we did. No ping pong for us. So we'll skip on to Laos!

Vientiane - "The sleepiest capital in the world" We arrived in Vientiane on Friday and met a really sweet Spanish couple -Noualia and Jordi - on the ride there. We went for dinner with them and turns out he was a magician! Jordi did card tricks and coin tricks and made Stacey's wedding ring appear in a little bag from his hand. All very impressive! See the photos!

Our main reason for travelling to Vientiane was to visit Nicky and Carol, Nicky being a fellow Dornoch Road resident and therefore lifelong friend :). We visited them on Saturday and they very kindly let us stay with them and use their bikes and washing machine. Both of which we really needed! We visited Buddha Park (a wierd 1930s concrete collection of massive Buddhas and other sculputures) and then they took us for a slap up Laos meal at their fave local restaurant. Brett loved the Laos curry and spicy sausage. We had a fantasic couple of days with them and they were so hospitable and kind. Thanks so much guys! Plus they advised us to buy our colourful flowery New Year shirts (seen above) for Pii Mai (Laos New Year). Consistent with his fashion sense, Brett's tactic was to get the NASTIEST looking thing on rack that will clash with everything.

After a fantastic time in Vientiane with Nicky and Carol we headed to Vang Vien. This is a beautiful place with a calm river running through it. We decided to join the "twenty somethings"on a tubing day down the river. Turns out "tubing" is essentially bar-hopping by sitting in an inner tube, floating down the river for about 10 mins total and the rest of the time spent in the bars playing beer pong. We showed the young 'uns how it was done until about 10pm, then left them to it and hit the hay. We definitely failed to maintain early promise and suffered from a horrendous hangover to boot. Typical! So after our fun and games on the river we made our way in a very fast minivan to the Plain of Jars. Our driver was a young buck and drove pretty badly; sending one woman into a 6 hour puking frenzy just infront of Stacey, and he completely avoidably ran over and killed dog in town and just drove off. A big-ish pet dog with a collar no less. Unbelievable.

Plain of Jars - Think Avebury/Stonehenge but with jars! A strange place in the middle of nowhere where there are 4 sites of ancient stone jars, about 2000 years old. No one really knows what they were for but mostly local people actually debate whether giants put them there. Hmmm. I smell bulls***. Very calm place but a little bit odd.

There are decommissioned ordance (ex-bombs) everywhere, from cafe's to hotels to by the side of the road. Often melted down and made into useful objects, tourist tat etc. some bomb casings now serve as garden onaments or planters! Brett's history fact of the day: It turns out that although the US never actually declared war with Laos, more bombs have been dropped on Laos than any other country in the world (per capita). After a couple days here we headed on yet another 8 hour twisting, bumpy, mountain journey in Laos, this time to Luang Prabang for New Year.

Luang Prabang - Cultural capital of Laos. WOW. The tradition is to throw water at each other to cleanse ready for the new beginning of the year. Which now basically means that loads of people get wasted and have a HUGE town-wide water fight for about 4 days. Luckily we bought a dry bag and we needed it! We got absolutely soaked by kids with super-soakers, middle aged Japanese tourists, ladyboys with buckets of water and everything else in between. "Unarmed" old ladies on bikes or 3 year old kids with supersoakers (who didn't really know what was going on) were all legitmate targets (as far as Brett was concerned). It was fantastic fun!

We also went on an elephant ride which was amazing. Our Elephant was 8 months pregnant and a little slower than the rest as she ate all the way around. But it was so much fun. We fed her some bananas and thanked her for the ride then headed to a 'whiskey village'. Basically an old lady who brews "whisky" from rice. After that we went to a beautiful waterfall for the afternoon. The only downside was how busy it was because of the holiday season meaning locals were out as well. Pesky locals! Ruining it for us foreigners! But it was still fantastic.

It was at this point that Stacey finally came face to face with the fact that this was a budget backpackers trip....no we could not afford the $400 each/3 hour flight from here to South Thailand. Nope, instead we were forced to face facts and commence our 60 hour journey with a 21 hour night bus ride from Luang Prabang to Chang Mai. the first 8 hours were literallly like riding a bus down a crap farm track. Average speed = 13mph. We actually could have ran the first 8 hours faster than the bus!

By 3am the road levelled out and we actually managed to get some sleep every so often. a quick changeover and a spot of luck meant that within 2 hours we were on an overnight sleeper train to Bangkok.

Facebook finally had some real use when we realised that a couple of friends we made in Nepal were also in Bangkok so we met up for breakfast! Hannah and John cracked us up first time around and we had a lot of fun exchanging nightmare travel stories again this time too. We were really lucky as we were off again on a train by 1pm and they were leaving Bangkok the next day heading the opposite way...nice how things work out sometimes.

Another 10 hour train, quick dinner and 4 hours overnight in a hotel in the port town of Chumphon and we were on our last leg...a ferry to Koh Tao. Hell yes we paid the extra $2 each to sit in the AC section and watch "Taken"! Paradise was in site...