Evening all,

Sorry for the delay in blogging again but the week has been all go and I didn't really get time to blog. It will be a short one too as the net is bloody expensive here.

After spending 2 days in Luang Prabang, I decided to head down to Vang Vieng, famous for it's tubing and numerous Friends bars! (I'll explain later) After being sold a VIP express bus to VV it quickly turned out that the bus was anything but! After several food and beer lao stops, we arrivd in VV at 11:30 pm. Nice. I met a guy on the bus who was also travelling solo so we teamed up to find digs in the town. What we didn't realise was that we also arrived on a Saturday and as a result the town was packed to the rafters. After knocking on numerous doors and being told no, we knocked on the Makhdavanh Guesthouse. The elderly lady who ran the place also didn't have any room, but seeing our plight she kindly offered sleeping space on her living room floor for the night. She even insisted we both have a beer lao before going to sleep. Now that's hospitality.

The next day, I found some digs and went off to explore the town. Being not very big, this didn't take long. The town is full of TV bars playing Friends and Family Guy on rotation. It also has loads of bars on the beach with hammocks and wicked scenery to boot. I rented a bike for the day and headed out to explore the caves in the area. It was a real manly bike in a bright shade of pink with a useful basket on the front.

What can I say a cave is a cave, and after seeing two, I quickly headed back to the serenity of the river, a Beer Lao and a hammock. I met up with the guys from the slowboat and headed out for an evening of partying like a rockstar! The next day we planned to go tubing. Tubing is a wicked and effortless activity. Basically you sit in a tractor tyre inner tube and float down the river via numerous bars and river jumps on the way. It was quite surreal having a barman hook you in the river and real you into the bar. Good fun though. I, of course am now a nice shade of pink all over. I tried to explain to the others that us brits should'nt take our T shirts for this reason off but they were very persuasive. Spent a couple of days therefore trying not to make any sudden movements!

After a couple of days in VV we headed out to Vientiene the capital of Lao. The place again, has a surreal feeling to it! It's probably the most chilled out capital city I've seen with little traffic and wide French style boulevards. Bloody nice though and the views over the Mekong were pretty speccy. After wandering what cultural activities we could undertake, Lao cookery, Language classes or temple visits, we decided that Ten Pin bowling and pool was the way to go, so off we headed for an evening of merriment. At this stage we lost some of the guys from our group as they had different travel plans. We however boarded the "Disco" bus down to Champasak. Basically this bus was illuminated with bright green flourescent lights and chugged along to the sound of Thai Karaoke. Our spirits were lifted when Die Hard 4 came on the TV, but later dashed when it was the Russian language version. Still old Brucie sounded even harder with a Russian accent.

Champasak was nice. It was a quiet non touristy place with some amazing ruins centered around a huge Phalous! (they only obviously had one thing on their minds) After that stop we headed to our current location of Si Phan Don (4000 Islands) It's extremely chilled out, and I'v spent my days sitting in a hammock on my bungalow porch doing nothing. It's a hard life.

Sorry no photo's for now as it's going to take to long, but i will upload them when I get to Cambodia! Sorry for the short blog too.

Catch you later

Will