LAOS

The Minute we entered Laos, we breathed a sigh of relief. People were smiling, no one was trying to sell us anything, rooms were cheap and had hot water and the place we were staying at had a puppy!!! We had one night to rest our weary legs before setting off on the Gibbon Experience the next day. Another 3 days of bloody hiking!

Well it was the best 3 days of roughing it, ever!! Our group consisted of a typical Scouzer from Liverpool who had a love affair with mosquitos second to none, a clumsy Canadian, a refreshingly-aware-that-other-countries-exist American, an English girl who brought along sequinced slip-ons as her hiking shoes, and a German couple a few decades older than the rest of us but still good fun!

The first day was spent hiking uphill for 6hrs with our local guides who could hardly speak English and who’s replies when we asked them the identity of an animal were always, “Animal!!” with such gusto that you just had to nod your head enthusiastically!
A good part of the hike was thankfully spent 150m above ground whizzing above the canopy on ziplines! Any kid’s absolute dream!! And I can tell you that we were all kids that afternoon!
Our accommodation for the 2 nights was in a tree house 40m above the ground. The real seller however was that when you had to do your ablutions, the whole tree could hear and you looked straight down the toilet bowl 40m to the ground below (that is if you could bear to open your eyes and see the resident swarm of bees hovering around your ass!) We had cooks ziplining in with containers filled to the brim with local food for our meals. It truly was an unforgettable experience!!

LUANG PRABANG

From there, we did the traditional tourist route of traveling along the Mekong by boat for 2 days to Luang Prabang. Although this might sound tedious, it’s not! It’s a massive excuse for a party with some of the biggest Festinos you’ll ever meet in your life! We also did the trip with the Scouzi, Canadian and Germans which made it a hoot – until we couldn’t shake Jamie(Canadian) and Keith for almost 2 weeks!!!!
Luang Prabang itself is a beautiful old French colonial town although we didn’t do much sightseeing. The reason for this was the unbearable heat and the fact that the 4 of us stumbled onto a 2 for 1 cocktail bar and undeterred by the fact that they served only the local deadly mix of Laos Laos as the spirit, we merrily 2 for 1’ned ourselves into oblivion and had to do the shuffle back to the guesthouse at some awful hour.

VANG VIENG

Our next stop along an army patrolled national route wasn’t much better! Vang Vieng is known as the tourist party capital of Laos with it’s ‘late night clubs’ that close at 12, restaurants all competing for your ‘earspace’ with their array of American sitcoms and the bars literally taking up all the space along the river. It was this river that got the better of us the day we took to the tubes. Literally 5m from the starting point, we were hoisted inland by the enthusiastic manager of the first of about 10bars along the way. Here we enjoyed our first Beer Laos (at 11am in the morning – disgusting, I know!!) and tried our gymnastics on the zipline that goes from a tree into the water. What they didn’t tell us however, is that they placed a stopper halfway across so we all ended up doing a triple summersault before hitting the water at a seriously unfortunate angle and spurring us on to keep on trying! Eventually the Abba hits from 1954 got through the beer Laos and we moved on to the next bar (20m downstream) where we met a rowdy crowd of Pomms and Ozzi’s, started having shots of that dreaded Laos Laos, and got generally untidy and more adventurous on the bigger swings (fancy that!). That was the general itinerary for the rest of the day with each stop getting rowdier and longer. At one point, the tubing between bars was actually 30m instead of the usual 20m so Shaun, feeling thoroughly dried out from the long wait left the group, drifted over to a deserted bar, fell up the steps, got himself a shot of Laos Laos, fell back down the steps and eventually joined up with the rest of us!! I got lots of sympathy from the other girls!!

PONSAVAN

Sadly we had to say farewell to Keith and Jamie after a good 4 days of simply being childish. We decided to do the cultural thing for a change and went up north to the Plain of the Jars which is famous for these massive stone jars that were once used for burial. More interestingly though, it was also the part of Laos that was carpet bombed by those stupid Americans during the Vietnam war! You can still see the bomb craters and have to walk along designated paths only because of all the unexploded bombs in the area that still kill locals (and tourists if you venture off the path!!) We also saw a cave in which 400people died when they were bombed!! It was so intense we nearly did a U-turn straight back to that 2-for-1 cocktail bar!

BOLAVEN PLATEAU & 4000 ISLANDS

Thoroughly cultured out after this, we ventured back down south on another one of those unbearable 12hr bus rides and went to the Bolaven Plateau, famous for it’s waterfalls and all we did there was swim and chill out with a Kiwi/Ozzi couple we met. After 4 days, we went to the southern most tip of Laos where the Mekong splits into thousands of islands literally known as ‘400 Islands’. Here we did even less. We swam in the river when the 3m to the water didn’t feel too far, read our books when they weren’t too heavy and I managed to pick up some exciting bug that had me almost delirious with fever and bonding with the hole in the ground that was the toilet. This happened on the day before we had to leave for Cambodia. The fact that this delightful bug wouldn’t leave me alone for 2 weeks, meant that poor Shaun had to carry both of our bags the next day when we had to make the crossing on 3 mini-buses with no aircon, a boat that was just painful and a strenuous walk up a hill!! Needless to say that when we got to the other side, we splashed out on a nice room with a comfy bed and satellite TV for Shaun and a proper toilet for me, neither of which we strayed very far from!