A 5 hour bus ride took us to Luang Prabang. We went up to a mountain top temple (the name escapes me, but our tour leader called it something along the lines of p**** although I'm pretty sure I misheard) to watch the sunset. This one was actually worth watching as it went down behind the mountains & the red reflected off of the Mekong River. After sunset we had a stroll around the night market, which seemed as though every stall was selling all the same stuf...

With Joel feeling a bit worse for wear, we headed off to the river at 11am to start our day of tubing. It takes roughly 3 hours to float downstream in your inflatable inner tube, but with all the bars on the way, we managed to make our trip last a good 7 hours. Considering we had been in the water less than 5 minutes before stopping at our first bar (much to Joel's disgust) we knew how this day was heading. My favourite bar was the Slingshot bar, where you had a ...

A 3 hour bus drive took us to Vieng Vang & quite possibly the time of our lives. We arrived a bit too late to do the tubing that day, but promised ourselves that we would definitely do it tomorrow. So instead we hired some bicycles & went on a 14km round trip to Poukham Caves & blue lagoon. One very steep climb up some rocks, with some shoddy makeshift handrails, we made it into the cave system. But even with our best Indiana Jones impressions, the la...

Today started with a 5 hour bus ride to the Laos capital of Vientiane. We had an afternoon of sightseeing, visiting the Presidential Palace, the Wat Sisaket, which was home to over 10,000 statues of Buddha (as if we hadn't seen enough of those already). We then visited a large structure on the main highway that the French had built as an apology for smashing up the city some when back in time. It was basically a poor man's replica of the Arch de Triumph. So we cl...

This morning started off just as hectic as Hanoi had been to us already. Thinking we had set our alarm for 5am in order to catch our 6am bus, it turned out that we had set it for 6am!! Luckily we awoke at 5:58am & turned into the Usain Bolts of the bag packing world, making it on to our bus for 6:03am. It was a 9 hour drive to the Vietnam/Laos border & our driver, a man that looked like the typical Vietnam criminals portrayed in the A-Team, had little dis...