Good Morning (from) Vietnam!

sorry couldn't resist an opener like that not everyday you get to use it!

Feels like an age since we last updated on our travels so apologies for being slack... So since last time we were travelling to Laos taking a bus from Chiang Mai in the North of Thailand even further north to one of the border points with Laos. The trip up was rather uneventful and the place where we stopped the night was just a boring street full of travel agents and pubs, so not really on our highlights reel.

We woke up at the crack of dawn the next day to be ushered to the border, which was rather chaotic, filling in forms and getting annoyed at German tour guides handing in a batches of 30 passports to get stamped a ridiculosuly beurocratic 6 times each!! Once we got through all that, the plan was to get on a boat down the Mekong river to a place called Luang Prabang, the slow boat ride takes 2 days and is renowned to be uncomfy and as the name suggest slow. We decided to take the quicker option of the bus taking 12 hours and were assured by a rather good salesman that the roads were good and built by the English which probably explains them being half complete and full of potholes.

Oh what a fun ride that was, the first half was great with nice smooth roads and then the second half was a flashback to India with the whole of a village joining us with 20 bags of rice piled everywhere. The roads in Laos are all through beautiful mountains and are therefore very windy with hairpins and up and down hills, but combine this with people who dont ususally travel by car results in mass travel sickness amongst the locals. Everyone was vomiting. Repeatedly. Amy nearly did too cos the lovely young man on the bag of rice next to her was hurling into little plastic bags tying them up neatly and then leaving them at her feet, I was bullied into swapping seats. Being the caring health professional that I am - i gave him some water and a travel sickness pill and it kinda stopped him. ungrateful git left the bags at my feet though and without a word of thanks got off the bus!

Anyway, we got to Luang Prabang late at night and after knocking up a few places managed to get sorted. Luang Prabang was a lovely place, its a Unesco world heritage site and as such is very quiet and has an 11.30 curfew, It had a real french feel to it and was full of retired folk on group tours. We met some good friends who had also survived the vomit bus and spent the evenings drinking beer Lao getting rather pissed before the curfew, pretending we'd got lost so they'd let us back in the hotel.

From here we took another (nicer) bus to Vang Vieng about 5 hours south. Vang Vieng has quite a reputation in Laos kinda like Amsterdam in Holland but with lots more Opium. There's a whole scene of travellers who come here and never leave, and they are well catered for with cheap drugs, dairylea sandwiches and endless repeats of Friends/Family Guy/Simpsons kinda like University really..(from what people tell me, I was too busy studying)

We took the more mature options in Vang Vieng and hired bikes with some friends to explore the surrounding countryside and found an ace river where you could jump off trees into the water! The next day we did some tubing which the genius folk of Vang Vieng have invented, whereby you get rather intoxicated (drunk in our case) and float down a river in a big tractor tube! There's all sorts of madness going off and all the bars along the river banks have made huge homemade dodgy looking trapeze, zip lines and water slides which are a great combination with artficial over inflated self confidence and the dry season....

Anyway, we had fun and survived it in one piece :o)

I'm gonna leave it there, cos I've been on this computer for ages and I'm quite hungry! We're still about a week behind with this update so I'll write the rest in the next few days.

Just to say that we're in hanoi now the capital of Vietnam having just come back from Halong bay. we're heading south now to a little place called Hue on an overnight train, so we'll hopefully write from there.

Love to all,

Tom and Amy xxx