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Sin chiao everyone (thats Vietnamese for hello),
Sorry for being a bit quiet on the blog front for a while, its been pretty hectic and most of the places i have been have been too remote to know what a toilet is, let alone the internet. So I am now actually writing to you from Vietnam (Hanoi) but i shall quickly fill you in on the major events of the last week or so....
TUBING : this is what a lot of you have been dying to hear about. well...it lives up to the hype--its fantastic. (mind you my recollectiom of it is seen through a lao lao whisky haze -thats the local rice whisky by the way!) basically, you hire your tube (big rubber ring from a tractor tyre) from the main village and then get taken upstream by a tuk tuk. you arrive at what appears to be a cross between Ibiza/the jungle book and its a bit daunting with all the (actually pretty horrendous) music blaring and offered free whisky shots on arrival-- of course we were hospitable and took said shot....only yo find out later from the barman wgo gave them to us that it was fermented with a millipead type-thing .eurgh. but he managed to convince me to give the bee fermented one a try too. (yes, yes, alright....there was not much convincing involved). at the start there are also lots of high rope swings and that sort of thing... so with a little bit of dutch courage (laos courage?) Dam and i climbed the tree to give the 10 meter rope swing a go...and for anyone who has heard about my trauma before going on the King Kong ride in America will know how i was feeling pre-swing (if you havent heard that particular anecdote i will happily bore you with it sometime). I was literally trembling, my brain couldnt see the sense of freely jumping off a 10mtr platform into a fast flowing river. But i bit the bullet and swung very ungracefully and managed to hit the water with an impressive ass-flop. It was such a rush tho- needless to say, i am srill suffering from a bruised coxit (ouch). But well worth it. Then we set off in our tubes down the river, and basically the idea is that there are bars on the river bank along the 4km stretch who quite literally 'fish for people'- throwing in lines for you to grap and then haul you in. We obviously tried a few, but my favourite i think was the 55 (ish) yr old lao man who jumped in afterus as we missed the line and swam down river for about 500m ... just to get us into his bar. after the miniture trek back to the bar we merrily enjoyed some more local brew and had a little boogie with mr.Lao who had some moves that compete with my dancefloor love affair. After a warm goodbye from the happy chappy we continued down the river. We stopped at a couple more bars before the final stretch. Then... because we had seen the finaldestination from land, we didnt believe the sign when (and on an a4 piece of paper, i might add) it said 'end of tubing'.(yes perhaps i was beng a little stubborn). But it wasnt until we had passed that point did i actually realise that it WAS the end and now we were just being swept down river as it was getting dark (eek). Luckily we found it rather funny and swam for our lives until we were beeched on some muddy reeds where we could haul ourselves out! All in all though, i was a cracking experience.
I think it was the following day that we decided to move on to Louang Prabang (which is a 5hr bus ride) to see come more of Laos. but low and behold, 5hrs...no no no.. try 11 and a half. We clearly hadnt expected the the state of the roads to be as bad as they were. Now, to start with, we had booked a VIP bus (double decker, sleeper seats, air con, leg room, toilet etc..) So we were rather peeved when we were informed that there was no more room on the big bus (even though we had pre-booked tickets) and that we had to squeeze onto this uncomfortable minivan with several other irate tourists.brilliant. we set off on our long old journey when we appeared to hit a traffic jam in the middle of the mountain (bearing in mind we ahd seen a total of maybe 5 vehicles in 3 hours) so we figured something must be up. We got out and wandered the 1/2 mile down the road to discover that there had been a landslide and an HGV was marooned. Uh.oh. So after a loooooooooooooong old wait (about 3hrs) there seemed to be some shift in activity, so we hopped in our van and tried our best to get through. Now, this is where i started to trust in Karma....they were only letting minivans through- VIP busses had to stay put (all night). So we smugly squeesed passed and we all brathed a digh of relief when we were fianlly through and back on course. Until we hit another landslide.great. So another 2 1/2 hrs later we were back on our way. after a few more hiccups we finally arrived in Louang Prabang at 11pm (arrival time was meant to be 2pm!) and just hit the hay.
Louang Prabang was Lovely, i really liked it- it had a fabulous night market and great eateries. We got up at 5.30 one morning to witnes the monks giving alms ceremony (when people line the dtreets and give them offerings) which was quite spectacular. We also went on a small day trip to the Kuang Si water falls and bear park whcih was beautiful, although i wanted to set the bears free. After a couple of days of getting familiar with the place we then went and spent a night in Moung Noi which is a very remote village in the far north and it was nice just being cut off from pretty much everything and just soaking up the incredible scenery. Then we spent a night in Nong Kieaw, doing pretty much the same until we returned to Louang prabang to catch our flight to Hanoi. Which is where we are now. So, u think thats pretty much up to date.. I shall try and be a bit more promt with these updates so they dont take up half of your day to read!!!
Hope all is great and sunny in England (or whichever part of the worrld you are in) and i will speak to you soon.
Lots of love, the little Robbo Traveller xxx
(p.s. the letters on this keyboard are completelty wiped out so if there are multiple spelling mistakes...i blame it on the keyboard this time!)
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