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Uf...today it was a hard day...or I rather say two days!! Right now we're in Hanoi, Vietnam, have just found an unbelievable room for 10$ (I think I have never been in a better room before...what kind of backpacking is that huh:) So as you know from the previous blog we did the Gibbons for which we had to wait a couple of days and as result had to speed up our trip around Laos.
This time it will be a bit more in English, so we won't let down our non-Slovenian speaking friends:).

So after Gibbons we cought the "quick" bus (14hrs) to Luang Prabang, the backpacker's city where indeed we found A LOT of tourists (I can see why). We enjoyed it so much we stayed there for 3 days (which with our tempo is quite a lot!). First day we did a tour with a french company(which we couldn't say it was the best choice), Pak Ou caves and the waterfalls where the caves kinda sucked but the waterfalls were amazing!! We were on one hand very lucky to come there quite late so it wasn't so crowded, although we could seriously spend the whole day there. The turquoise cool water, the nature around it, the sound of waterfalls and the swing:) were just like in farytale (Uros kept on saying: Why don't we have sth. like that in Slovenia:) The evening was time for the night market and it really is like they say...the best! We ate a fresh Mekong fish and a chicken fillet from the stall, sticky rice, best cakes, drank superior shakes...btw. the diet that I was talking about is definitely not working!!!:)

Next day was more relaxing...we basically just hang around and enjoying the city and the evening was time for party! Erin (Australian girl from gibbons) had a birthday so a drink at first end up being much more than that:) We went to a beautifully expensive restaurant by the river with a bunch of other people, than to the Hive bar (excellent - Kaja, Klara: po dolgem casu sem slisala un komad I see u standing on the corner of the dance floor... (dnb)!) where we met the crazy couple from England...we ended in Bowling alley and had lots of fun!

But the big day came the day after...ELEPHANTS!! We were wishing to ride them since we came on the trip but just hadn't found the right offer. So after searching and shopping around for almost a whole day a lucky star fall on us and we found the perfect one! Most agencies have offers for big groups where you ride an elephants in a line one after another and end up paying 60$ if you also want to bathe them. We found a private elephant cave next to Mekong river where they only had 2 elephants and for 35$ you get to ride them for an hour, feed them for cca 2 hours, than ride on their neck and wash and play with them in Mekong river and in the end do some more riding on their neck. We each had a girl elephant, mine was named On and Uros' sth that is impossible to pronounce:) It was really one of the best days...it could almost be comparable to the Gibbons ;P In the evening we took the night bus and we were off to Vang Vieng!

Vang Vieng used to be a very quiet city with beautiful landscape...well the landscape is still beautiful but the city is now everything but quiet. The whole city is packed with restaurants playing episode after episode of Friends and hordes of deadly drunken tourist crawling the streets. The "point" of the town now days seems to be tubing on the river. The first day was more relaxed due to a difficult night drive. The second day we ment to go tubing (lets see what all the fuss is about) but we got the first rainy day since we started traveling - as it end up that Friends restaurants weren't such a bad idea:) So in the end we had to pack all the "to do" things in the third and last day in Vang Vieng, so we rented motorbikes along with Erin (australian) and couple of her friends, went to see a few caves and in early afternoon finally went tubing (without a tube ofcourse becouse it was just too damn expensive!). The water park (tubing area) looks pretty much as Croatian ZRCE with tons of dangerously drunk tourists jumping of Flyfox and making a bit of fool of themselves. But we ran into Jen and Rich (the crazy english couple from Luang Prabang-guys we mean that in a very nice way!!!) and had a realy cool time...we even managed to make a bit of fools out of ourselves too:) The night ended on the town's river island...in Bucket Bar...so what can I say, Vang Vieng is a party place!

For the next day we booked an obseenly long ride to Vietnam, Hanoi...28 hours and hit the road...details come in the Vietnamese post because now Uros is kicking me off the internet!

La khon!

Anja & Uros

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