Driving across beautiful Laos on my own motorbike is an immensely liberating experience. Not that I have been constrained much at all on my trip in the last seven months (as compared to my "previous life" with all its obligations that came with it), but blasting through this amazing country with its incredibly friendly people takes the entire experience to a whole new level. From Savannakhet in the south we did a 750km loop north-east and then west again towards Vientiane, leaving the paved road on day three past the city of Tha Khaek and only getting back onto it on [View Full Entry]

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Tha Khaek was to be our base from which to visit the surrounding sights and provinces, and what better way to do this than to hire a motorbike (Dirt bike would have been so much better, but not available here) for 4 days and tootle off into the sunset with a few provisions and a hand drawn scribble of a map! Dan - Day 1 (Tha Khaek - Ban Tha Long) Up awake and excited we left our backpacks with the guest house to look after for 4 days and had a bit of breakfast (noodle soup) made a trip via [View Full Entry]

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Well I have now travelled down from Vang Viang to a place called Tha Khaek...6 hours south of Vientiane, Laos' capital city. I spent two nights in Vientiane and it is the most understated capital city you could imagine. It is no more built up than a leafy suburb of south county Dublin and from what I could see it has no sense of a city about it at all. Think of a small rural town in the west of Ireland and you begin to get the pace of life around this place. The fastest thing about it was the Mekong [View Full Entry]

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A charming, sleepy little riverside town. Very old and run down looking. We spent a couple days going around, wandering by the restaurants at the riverside, eating tons of ice cream (Anais is an ice cream fiend). Our best day was definately when we rented to motorbikes. This was my second time on a bike, but with an additional challenge - the town had no automatics - only manuals. I figured it out pretty well, I guess, but it took some getting used to! We drove out of town down the potholed highway, dodging shaggy-eared cows and herds of goats. There [View Full Entry]

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Text will follow later but I'll let the photo's speak for themselves!! What a gorgeous country! Love Steve and Laura. xxx [View Full Entry]

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11.3. von Vientienne nach Tha Khaek: Am Morgen gings frueh an den Busbahnhof, sodass wir um 6:30 abgefahren sind. Leider hat dann der Buschauffeur noch keinen Zmorgen gehabt und so haben wir nach nur 5 Minuten Fahrt schon eine ca. 40 Minuetige Pause eingelegt. Zudem wurde dann noch ein Toeff (Motorbike) in den Bus geladen (also im Busgang zwischen den Stuehlen),... auf der Fahrt nach Tha Khaek haben wir dann noch einen ausgebrannten Bus gesehen (auf der anderen Fahrbahn), was einem dann schon mal kurz die Nackenhaare zu Berge stehen laesst, da die Sicherheit hier zimlich klein ist,.. Am Abend [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, We are still in Laos making our way towards Cambodia slowly and having a good time along the way. We left Luang Prabang on the 7th of Feb and took a 9 hrs bus ride to Vientiane. What a ride that was. At first the bus was "normally" packed, but right after leaving the station the bus driver stopped the bus and another 17 people got one and were sitting on stalls in the middle of the bus, that is when it got abnormally packed. On top of this they put the TV on to play some very-cheesy-sing-along- Lao-pop-Karaoke, [View Full Entry]

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The Loop 08/02/2008 - 11/02/2008 2 scouters 4 days - 3 nights 475 km We arrived in ThaKhaek with the intention of doing the Loop. A 475km route around central Laos countryside. We checked in the ThaKhaek Travel Lodge, known for having numerous books written by travellers who have done the Loop, so we could read about other people's experiences. On the 8th, we rented a couple of small scouters from the guest house. The owner only had one left, and had to borrow another one from a friend. He told us he had checked the motorbikes, the wheels were good [View Full Entry]

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More pix and activities as we spent our time at the clinic. A typical day is from 730am - walk from hotel to the site - a short 15 min walk along the scenic Mekong River then to the venue to help out in crowd control and then the various stations. Work typically ends around 4pm followed by a de-brief and then dinner at around 7.30pm. The weather is cool in the morning and nites and it was rather fun eating steamboat and hot plate without having to perspire. A luxury indeed for typical Singaporeans like us who r very used [View Full Entry]

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This journal is about our few days at the mission itself. Starting from Tues afternoon to Friday. We arrived at around 1pm at Tha Khaek and checked in to the hotel, a modest looking dormitory facing the Mekong River. Moths were everywhere and stuck on the wall...as if it was the most natural thing to do. Clinic days start from 6.30am with breakfast then at 7.30am we went to the site and help out in various stations - until the last villager was sent off. The max no of villagers on thurs was 3663 - a pretty large figure considering that [View Full Entry]

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