Hello, we're in Laos now. Spent a day seeing the sights around Phnom Penh, including the Killing Fields and S21 Genocide Museum. Both were interesting but obviously horrible at the same time. The Killing Fields are very raw with piles of clothing around the bases of the trees and bones sticking out of the ground in some places. There's a memorial in the middle with 17 shelves carrying 8000 skulls. We heard too much about the evil ways people were killed and seeing the torture rooms at S21 made it seem even more awful...

Luckily the next day was much happier with the river festival taking place. It's Cambodia's biggest festival, most people can't afford accomodation so they sleep on mats on the ground just to be there. Hundreds of boats raced during the day, then in the evening there was a parade of lit up boats along the river and fire works too.

We arrived in Vientiane, Laos for the last day of festivities so we saw more fireworks around the big golden stupa. Apart from that festival the city was very quiet, hard to believe it's a capital, but the atmosphere was nice and we were pleased to relax a bit. We made a trip out to buddha park and saw the huge concrete buddhas, looked round the big market then headed up to Vang Vieng.

We randomly met Simon and Lejla on a bus, we first met in Argentina in April. We all checked into a nice guest house with bungalows on the river, then spent yesterday tubing with 2 Irish couples we met on the way. Tubing is floating down the river in a big tyre and stopping at lots of bamboo bars on the way. There was a lot of drinking, and some swinging on ropes (mainly by the boys) it was so much fun. Today we cycled round the countryside to see the caves and tomorrow we're heading to Luang Prabang, I'll try and get some photos on here soon!

Hope everything's good at home, feel free to leave messages on here for us! Love Vicky xx