So after the worst ever night bus journey, further four hour bus journey and then rickety narrow boat ride to Don Det, our chosen island, it would have been great to check straight into our place and take a shower. No such luck though as nowhere on this island takes bookings and you just have to turn up and hope for the best. Leaving very happy BG in a bar by the jetty with all our bags, I left to try to find us somewhere nice to stay. An hour later, it was cle...

So after over a month of avoiding all long bus journeys with one excuse after another, the time had come when neither BG or the budget could take it any more and I reluctantly accompanied BG to book the seven hour bus trip from Luang Prabang down to the Laos capital, Vientiane. I couldn't complain about the price, £5 each including door to door service so at 7am we were picked up from our lovely guesthouse in a tuk tuk and taken to the bus station. While I was d...

With numb bums galore, we dragged our cases through the streets of Luang Prabang admiring the pretty houses, bakeries and wooden street signs along the way. Immediately so different from Thailand we knew that this was a place we were going to enjoy and looked forward to exploring properly. An added bonus was that for the first time, we could afford the number one place to stay (hooray!) and had managed to book the best room in a quaint guesthouse for a colossal ...

Having decided to go for the two day boat option to get to Laos, we woke up bright and early, well just early in my case, and waited for a van to pick us up from our guesthouse. The nerves had really kicked in as we'd heard mixed things about this journey; the majority bad and included stories of sitting on wooden boxes, crates and even rice sacks for two days solid among various species of live stock. The first leg of the journey was 'just' an eight hour ride in...