Laos

We have decided that Laos is definitely the most generally friendly country in the world so far! (Having said that, of course we have been ripped off, witnessed bicycle road-rage, and have friends who were robbed twice during their one-week stay, but a much higher proportion of people here than elsewhere have been very welcoming. Maybe it's just the smug feeling I got from scooting through village after village of small children chasing the bikes and squeaking 'Hello! Hello! I love you!' but we both feel safe and pretty welcome here, which makes a change from most of Thailand!

After crossing the border into Huay Xai we stayed the night (harmless little border town) and took a flight the next morning to Luang Prabang in northern Laos. We were dismayed when the taxi driver dropped us off outside the concrete hut with three walls that passes for the Laos Airlines airport terminal in Huay Xai, but not as much as when we saw the runway... Takeoff downhill, anyone?!? Apparently it helps the (small, propeller-driven) planes out.
Luang Prabang is an attractive medium-sized town with heavy French influences in the architecture and food (sandwiches!! instead of stalls selling barbecue, they fill you a baguette in front of your eyes!), right on the bit where the vast Nam Kong and Mekong rivers join (am sure there's a proper geography term for it), which makes a great view frm the town. It was very heavily touristed, with white faces outnumbering Laos, and tour outfits were the most common shopfront on the main street. Most of the tours are expensive and disappointingly packed, or brief, and if you want to see any of the real countryside you need to take a trip further north or bok a multiple-day tour. We didn't have much time so we decided to join in the tourmania and get me an elephant ride, which I've wanted to do for ages!
You sit in the basket thing on the elephant with a driver on the elephant's head, and they take you for an hour's trek in the jungle about two hours by truck/boat/hike from the town. It was actually a really nicely run outfit and at the end you can buy a huge bunch of bananas for about 10p to feed to your elephant. I was warned that ''elephant has big mouth, so if one banana at a time he get angry',' so I bought two bunches and our elephant couldn't stuff them fast enough - he had five in his mouth and another five in his trunk so I think he was happy. On elephant day we met Jess and Freek, who were on holiday from Bruges for five weeks, and had a good go at taking pictures of each other on elephants (given that theirs made a bid for freedom halfway through we did rather well). That night we did some market shopping for shawls and bits of tat, and I practiced my finely-honed haggling skills. That extra 50p does make a difference! The four of us took a bus together to Vang Vieng on the way to Vientiane - we discovered that we had all heard about the tubing phenomenon in VV and were determined to have a go a it was on our way! Standard six hour bus on hairpin mountain roads at ridiculous speeds, and when we got to Vang Vieng it was 4pm and throwing it down. We found a guesthouse surprisingly quickly for surprisingly cheap, then set off in fluorescent pink board shorts (mine, borrowed from Jess for the occasion...plenty of girls were walking through town in bikinis and nothing else, and maybe I'm getting old but it was either the pink shorts or my trousers) for the shop where we hired the big rubber rings. Yup, the latest thing to make it big in Laos is sitting in a big rubber ring and floating down the river past a dozen bars, where the staff will happily put out big sticks for you to grab on to so you can head to their bar for a free shot of laolao (local whisky that puts hairs on your chest) as well as numerous beers and maybe a death-defying jump from a homemade swing 20ft above the water. We heard that night that one of the swing bridges collapsed that day and dumped ten guys into the river! The river was hugely swollen as it had rained for days, and even a couple of locals looked askance, but we were determined to do it anyway and jumped into the (freezing, incredibly fast-flowing, debris-laden) water. Jess got caught in a current and was soon nothing but a dot in the distance, with Freek paddling desperately to catch up with her and pull her into the bank for a beer, but as we missed three bars and they disappeared into the distance John and I decided that we had to put ashore for a bit, and stopped at one of the bars. We were dragged up through the mud and given free laolao (only had a bit, after all they had several drownings a year from tubing drunk in Vang Vieng!), then set off to catch Jess and Freek. We never caught up with them as it turned out they were swept all the way down the river to the end of the bar crawl, but we stopped in a couple more places and enjoyed being swept along in the water with the mountains as a staggering backdrop.

Having all survived the tubing we decided (John's idea) to kayak to Vientiane - half kayak, half minibus (truck). There were suppposed to be class I and II rapids (basically bumpy but flat water) on the way, but after the recent rain what we were facing was a bit rougher than that...I think we were all a bit surprised when we approached the rapids and they turned out to be two-metre high walls of churning white water. Freek and Jess managed to paddle through but John and I, having managerial issues (I don't like not being in charge in a boat), managed to dump ourselves in the river. The dry bag proved its worth and we scrambled back into the boat undamaged, so it was actually quite exciting falling in once I realised I wasn't going to get my legs broken by rocks under the surface or be trapped under the kayak and drown (about which we'd been cheerfully, and briefly, warned). We had a delicious lunch of impromptu barbecue on a huge rock sticking out into the river, and when we got to the end of our paddling session we all piled into one pickup (fourteen people in a space that could have fit eight at a squeeze), with John and Freek standing on the metal step at the back of the truck. They were then joined by four hitchers. After about two hours in the rain, we got to Vientiane and spent ages looking for a place to stay, finally settling on a crap little hotel, dingy and rather insecure, for 19 dollars. Cheeky buggers. But that did not matter, because the reason we were in Vientiane (as far as Jess and I were concerned anyway) was to eat authentic French food at unbelievably cheap prices! And eat it we did (the proprietor was actually French!). We all had steak, more than one bottle of wine was had, there were goat’s cheese salads all round and the bill came to $50 between the four of us!! The next day we said goodbye to Jess and Freek, who were flying to Siem Reap, and booked ourselves a long auld bus to Pakse, in southern Laos.

The journey was alright, we arrived early in the morning and decided to stick around for a day or two before booking a cheapo flight to Siem Reap (a sixth of the price it cost to fly from Bangkok!). Pakse is a sleepy little town that most people use as a jumping-off point for the thousand islands in Laos, or for flights out of Laos, so decent accommodation wasn’t hard to find, and they have a branch of that lovely Indian chain, Nazeem’s, so I was happy! We rented scooters and went for some trips into the countryside, visiting a couple of nearby towns (more like settlements, ‘town’ implies a more organized situation!) and waterfalls. The bikes were manuals, which was really good fun once you got used to it, though mine behaved like a mad donkey, kicking into gear with a bit of an attitude! The waterfalls, to which you can take expensive day trips from Pakse with a tour operator (scooters cost something like 3 pounds a day), are idyllic and because it was low season, abandoned except for a few local children and an old lady and her grandson(?) selling warm cokes, so we spent a couple of lazy afternoons basking on the rocks.