So what we learnt about Laos is that:

1. It is beautiful, so, so beautiful.
2. It is ran by children. They literally run everything. I’m pretty sure I’ve never witnessed an 8 year old serve anybody cigarettes before. Not in a shop anyway.
3. They love baguettes. Baguettes everywhere with everything.
4. It has massive wasp things (this didn’t please Lyvette at all and her fly-fitting upped its game again).
5. The animals all have saggy bits. I can’t even describe what the saggy bits are or where they were but they were definitely a bit odd.
6. It could really do with some trains. I have never been on so many bus journeys in my life, especially on ones where I was thrown around like a tennis ball and alternated hitting my head on the roof and cheek on the floor every five minutes.
7. 100% DEET is great at keeping midges away, even though it may cause your skin and anything else that comes into contact with it to disintegrate. It’s worth it though, Laos is high risk malaria and you totes don’t want that. It can also come in handy as nail varnish remover.
8. Laos turned me into a thief. I’m addicted to stealing soap (not in a bad way).

It took a total of 34 hours to get from North Thailand to Laos. This mainly involved sitting on a bus, however the travel company did arrange a stop overnight in a delightful motel just on the border. And when I say delightful I mean it represented something out of a horror movie. The plug in the sink was just a hole. I only noticed when I saw my toes were frothing and realised I’d spat my mouthwash into the sink and managed to Listerine my feet. Then there was the bed. It was like lying on a giant concrete slab with a dip in the middle. And the cobwebs. They were so big we could have used them as hammocks. After a fantastic night’s sleep we got back in the bus with our two new Canadian friends Kristen and Cereza who we were to share the next 24 hours in the van with. Now Laos is not flat and that journey lasted approximately my entire life, going up and down mountains on barely existent roads. We spent the whole day bumping up and down, acting like we were on a bucking broncho and head butting one another. I think Laos made me travel sick and I was soooo grateful to reach Luang Prabang and finally peel myself out of that van.

Luang Prabang

A very nice place with the most amazing waterfall I have ever seen – it is definitely worth a visit to Kuang Si. We met the british girls – two Gemma’s and Isla who we were to spend the next 2 weeks with. We could tell we were going to get along the moment we started comparing toilet stories and playing ‘would you rather’. We ate baguettes and I stole some soap from the hostel.

Vang Vieng

Infamous for its tubing stories. Grab a rubber ring and jump in the river, stopping at the bars along the way. Simple and enjoyable despite the horror tales of how it had been shut down for years because people kept dying en route by either a) drowning or b) falling over intoxicated and hitting their heads on rocks. Hardly surprising when you throw a load of pissed people in a river.  I have a friend from uni who actually passed out in his ring and then woke up in a random village.

Then someone made up the rumour about the waterfall that would claim you if you went too far down the river;

“Don’t go past that bridge or you’ll go over the waterfall!”
“Waterfall?”
“Yeah with loads of rapids, you’ll die for sure”
“But that last bridge is only 200m away!”
“Exactly. And also you’ll have to pay a fine if you don’t take your tube back in time”

Cue lots of people off their chops thrashing about trying to avoid this non existent waterfall that could potentially claim their lives.

Following the above experience we decided to go cave tubing (sober). For this we were given head torches (obviously mine didn’t work) and joined a long line of people pulling themselves through a dark cave on a piece of rope.  This was, in a word, carnage. People deciding to go in all directions, into walls, in the pitch black. We were at the back and suddenly everyone started coming back towards us on this piece of rope so we had to turn and head back at the front of the line. Which is fine when you have a head torch that works. I spent the next 20 minutes head butting a cave wall.

We stayed in Vang Vieng for 4 nights, mainly because Lyvette grew very attached to our room with banana shaped beds on which the sheets didn’t properly fit and refused to leave. And it took her 4 days to venture out after she experienced 2 human sized wasps flapping towards her. I nursed her onto the bus with promises of using the knife to stab any fist sized object that came within a 400m radius. We also had to wave goodbye to our new found friends as the Canadian girls Kristen and Cereza, who we’d shared many a bus journey with and spent numerous hours head butting each other were heading to Vietnam and the Gemma’s and Isla were too off their chops to face another bus journey that soon.

Vientiane

The bus to Vientiane was like being inside Aladdins cave with its tassles and dangly bits and our driver was a maniac. Everytime we hit a speed bump we took off and all flew face first into the windscreen. All of us, that is, except the one guy who somehow managed to spend the entire journey asleep using a bag of crisps as a pillow. How the bag didn’t explode into his ear drum I’ll never know.

After this jerky journey we arrived at our hostel to our lovely air conditioned room. Lyvette’s a sweaty beast and turned the AC down to 16 degrees before anyone else turned up, which was fine until it got to 12am and it felt like we were sleeping in the Arctic. I couldn’t sleep because I was wondering what the banging in the room was. Then I realised it was my teeth chattering together. I looked up to see the girl opposite me wearing a full on Parker jacket and ski boots before clambering back into her bunk. Then another girl finally managed to de ice her mouth and whisper “my toes – they’ve turned to ice…” Meanwhile Lyvette lay on her top bunk, nearly naked, taking in the paradise of the air conditioning. Eventually girl no 2 managed to move her frozen body and find the AC remote (which Lyvette was hiding under her pillow) and turn it up to 25. I have never been more grateful to anyone in my life. Girl no 1 managed to take off all her ski gear, my teeth stopped chattering and the icicles from my eyelashes finally began to melt.

Konglor

Let’s go to Konglor and see the cave! It’s supposed to be pretty cool. I say ‘supposed to be’ because we never actually made it. The journey there took 10 hours. On a bumpy bus (you may notice a pattern here). And there were floods. And when I say floods I mean the roads were like rivers. At one point we couldn’t see the road but naturally the driver continued anyway. The ticket man even got off the bus and waded through next to us to make sure we stayed on the road. The water was up to his waist. Then the water started coming up the stairs of the bus. And we had to rescue our bags from drifting away. Then the boats sailed by (I’m not even exaggerating). Then the cows swam past followed by a guy on a lilo sipping a Laos Beer. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Eventually our bus boat reached the end of the flooded road and we hit dry land again. Konglor was deserted and the cave was shut. Which meant we turned around, back on the bus boat and another long journey

4000 Islands (Si Phon Don)

This was my favourite place. We arrived on Don Det island by boat and found ourselves a lovely little bungalow (wooden hut) by the river. Lyvette wasn’t too sure about the cracks in the floorboards and walls but eventually the pink princess net and the family of geckos sold it to us. We then stationed ourselves at a bar on the riverfront and waved in Gemma and Isla as they returned to our lives in their gondola just as the sun was setting. It was very romantic and we were touched at how happy Gemma was to see us again, waving her arms in excitement. She had a spider on her.

The next few days were spent hiring bikes, cycling to the next island and roaming around checking out waterfalls and dolphin spotting. When I say dolphin spotting they were so far away they could have just been Laos locals jumping around with plastic fins on their backs. The bike ride was going well and we cheerfully pedalled around on our circus bikes until I got a puncture, at the furthest point possible, without any form of repair kit, just as it started to get dark. But it was ok, I had cleverly packed my head torch and we found a repair centre. Phew. The man who ran the repair centre was a very helpful 4 year old child who tried to pump my tyre up with a spanner. No repairs were going to happen here so we decided to battle on.

Now if you have ever ridden a circus bike with a flat tyre on roads that are about as smooth as a the Rocky Mountains with a head torch that is so bright that mosquitoes and flies from all over the world come flocking and therefore decide to live on your face, then you will understand that this situation is not the most comfortable, especially when you have to ride 12km like this. It was an experience as we bumped our way along the island surrounding by darkness (bar the light from my head torch) and a swarm of flying animals so big that they could have actually picked the entire island up and flew off with it (Lyvette was ecstatic about this so her journey home involved getting thrown about like a rag doll due to all of the pot holes and fly-fitting at the same time – it must have looked like someone was doing voodoo on her).

When we finally arrived back we spent the rest of the night relaxing and removing flies and pubes from our food (it was probably a baguette) at a local restaurant. It was such an eventful day that we thought we’d just head back to our bungalows for some cards and hammock time and then I accidently stripped the paint off the handrail with my 100% DEET and had to spend the next 2 days going around with ‘handrail’ painted down my forearms from where I’d leant on it after applying repellent. As we lounged in our hammocks and laughed about Isla asking if Anglesey was in India we looked up to see that we’d acquired a farm. Cats, dogs, the original gecko family plus all their relatives, spiders, beetles all lingering around our balcony. There was even a dolphin up there with us at one point. I reckon they had all been attracted by the head torch on the way home. Obviously this didn’t sit well with Lyvette who doesn’t like flying things and Gemma who hates spiders and the next twenty minutes were spent trying to shed our Doctor Dolittle image and encouraging the geckos to eat the beetles (we don’t even know if they eat beetles), the dogs to chase the cats off, the spiders to get the flies (and then remove themselves from our paint-free balcony) and basically create World War 3 in animal land so we could be left in peace and I wouldn’t end up sleeping next to someone fly-fitting and acting like they were being electrocuted all night.

We enjoyed our time in Don Det. My main concern about leaving the island was that all of our animals would follow me thinking I was the bungalow because I had most of the handrail still attached to my arm.

The 4000 islands were our last stop in Laos and from here we headed to Cambodia. This started well when we didn’t have the money to get across the border and I got red ants in my knickers, but that’s a different blog…

Please note: This is the first country where Lyvette hasn’t collapsed and when I mentioned in the last blog that our fringes have grown it was a false alarm. Well, they have grown slightly but unfortunately this is making them (mine in particular) even more unruly.