Sorry its been a while guys, we have been really busy travelling between places and have struggled with wifi access. So where do we start…..well the overnight train took us to Nong Khai (that was intresting) We manged to get a few bed bug bites and considering the feeling of being vertical, we are convinced the train was travelling rapidly down hill and so didn’t manage to get much sleep. After meeting a french train buddy called Peter, he helped us figure out our next destination and took us to get some local food, chicken larp and sticky rice. We shared a tuk tuk to the ‘friendship bridge’ and then had to purchase a bus ticket to the border. Getting into laos was a bit tricky- we didn’t realise that all 10 ATM’S wouldn’t be working and didn’t manage to get any money out before crossing the boarder.
We caught the bus to vientiane, then arranged our mini bus to Vang Vieng which took 4 hours or so. We arrived quite late, the hostel we wanted was booked up so we stayed in a guest house next door for half the price. The following day we went Tubing- for those of you who don’t know….. basically travelling down the river inrubber rings, along the river there are 3 bars and as you travel down thr river they pull you in with rope. Great fun, we played beer pong, volley ball and had a beer or five. We went out with a few people we met that day and bar hopped down the road from were we was staying- had some lovely food too! Following day we had a lie and decided to rent some bicycles to explore more of Laos.
After check out, the next morning we booked our bus to Luang Prabang. Suddenly didn’t seem so appealing when 2 o clock rolled round and what can only be described as a shack on wheels came to pick us up. No air con and polly pocked sized seats, we crammed our bodies into the back, crushing our knee caps! The road was a horrendous quality but the views were spectacular, the journey felt like a life time. We were certainly happy to lay down at the hostel after. We ended up have an early night and got up for Kuang Si waterfalls in the morning, the place really is postcard perfect and had great fun jumping off waterfalls and swinging from rope swings in to the clear blue water. We stayed there for most part of the day with a couple of girls from our dorm, later that evening we grouped together with some peple from the hostel and went out for some drinks. Very different to Vang Vieng, everything closes at 11pm and everyone goes to the ‘bowling alley’ to finish the night, not for the bowling of course, more for the fact that they don’t stop selling booze untill 2am!
All in all we really enjoyed our time in Laos and would have loved tp spend more time there.After much thought and advice from others we decided to ditch the 28 hour bus ride to Hanoi, and caught a flight instead, so far so good. We will update you about vitenam in the next blog!
Much love! Xx
p.s pictures to come, we are currently struggling to upload them as we don’t have the facilites to do so yet.