Blogs from Tha Khaek, South, Laos, Asia - page 4

I found Vientianne pretty disappointing. Considering it's the Capital City, there's not much to see .......a few wats, a lookout tower in the middle of a roundabout, a stadium....nothing you haven't seen a hundred times already in SE Asia. There was a Buddha Park you could go to, but it meant a bus ride a couple of hours out of town there and the same again on the way back. Maybe I'm getting pretty lazy about travelling now, but a couple of hours on a bus just to see a few buddha statues didn't really appeal. Instead I hired a bicycle for a day and tried desperately to find something worth seeing. Not much joy! I did manage one constructive thing whilst there.....extending my visa for a couple of weeks. It's only $2 a day, and ... read more

(Day 240 on the road)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 day six as we were approaching the capital. The first day (and actually the whole week) on our new bikes went surprisingly smooth. We had purchased cheap Chinese-made bikes, and pretty ... read more

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 the bank (on the road for 4 days you need a stash of cash) and let Nic do her thing in the local market to get us a few supplies (lucky she never came back ... read more

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 were enormous limestone mountains jutting out of nowhere, shooting vertically upwards and completely covered in green - remeniscent of Halong Bay. quite good. We crossed this bridge, where a whole bunch of naked little boys ... read more

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, very, very loud. As we went along, the road started got winding and 2 kids sitting next to us started puking. We ended up giving them baby towels and passing then plastic bags which they ... read more