Lovely Laos and motorcycle madness

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Hello, Louise again, apologising for a lack of entries. We've been on the move a lot recently, and frankly we're rather lazy. But I now get to fill you in on lovely Laos.
We got our minivan to Chiang Khong, a border town in Northern Thailand. We stayed there just one night as the slowboat departed the next morning. Then it was a few wasted hours of border officialdom (borders are fast becomming one of our least favourite parts of travelling) and we squeezed onto our slowboat, headed for Pak Beng. Squeezed is the word, as they'd completely overbooked the boat, and we had to sit on a bench that was prised from the roof and stuck at the front of the boat. Pulling away from the dock, we realised that the rest of our group who hadn't made it onto our boat, had been ferried onto a boat that looked suspiciously more luxurious as they waved to us from their padded leather seats. We endured a good couple of hours on our hard wooden benches, but once the boats pulled over to let some children on to sell us stuff, we jumped ship and defected to the other boat. This incurred much bad feeling from the original boat, but all's fair when it involves a comfy seat.
We stayed just one night in Pak Beng, and it's around about this time that my ipod breaks. It's sad, and it deserves a mention in the blog. The Russell Brand podcasts were the only things keeping us sane when surrounded by so much foreigness... donations welcome, by the by. The next day everyone got on the same lumpy boat and started our 10 hour trip to Luang Prabang. The slowboat is just an excuse for people to drink themselves silly on BeerLao, and it's worth a go if you ever get a chance.
We arrived in Luang Prabang in the early evening, and shuffled from hostel to hostel trying to hear a price that we were prepared to pay. It was quite a shock that accommodation wasn't dirt cheap in Laos, but this could be down to the French legacy. The food however certainly is cheap, and we settled down to a veggie buffet for 5000 kip a pop. LP is a sweet little place, with some nice wats and museums, and some even better cheese. The French left their culinary impression on the place, which today means that you can get a freshly baked baguette and coffee for breakfast, and for dinner a cheese platter complete with proper salad and red wine, for a fraction of the price that you'd pay in Europe.
In Laos there's a curfew which means that all businesses must be shut at 11.30pm. This is partly due to the fact that a lot of people in Laos wake up very early to prepare food for almsgiving to monks at 6am. Even so, in LP there's one place open past midnight where they continue to serve alcohol, which is the bowling alley, which we went to with some people we met on the slowboat, and got back to our hostel way past our official bedtime. The man who owned the hostel was incredibly sweet though, and accepted us as family in the end, despite our waking him up. This night will also be always remembered as The Night of the Shared Dream, which I won't go into here, but it was terrifying and shook us both up - feel free to ask us about it.
After a few days in Luanag Prabang, we took a bus to the backpacker town of Vang Vieng. We were told we had to come here and go 'tubing', whatever that was. We checked into our lovely bamboo hostel with stunning countryside views, and booked a trip the next day for tubing into caves and then down the river. Essentially, tubing is just floating in some water in a rubber ring. First we tubed into a flooded cave, then we got driven to the river, where bars and swing-jump things (can't remember the actual name) have been set up all along the banks. So basically, you just float from bar to bar in a rubber ring, get sunburnt and a few grazes from some ungraceful dismounts, and see if you can make it to the bottom of the river before the sun goes down and it gets cold. We didn't, but we luckily had a guide there looking out for us, who arranged a tuktuk to drive us back into town. By 7pm all the tubers were fast asleep in bed, leaving the ones who didn't go to go enjoy the bonfire parties and tv bars dotted all around town.
Tubing was fun, but VV was quite a surreal place, and we couldn't hack more than one day of it. There were stories of people who had been in Vang Vieng for 2 weeks and and gone tubing every day... it's easy to get sucked into a vortex of lying about and not doing much, but we felt like we wanted to move on, especially since our Vietnam visa was already counting down. So the next day we hopped on a local bus to the Lao capital of Vientiane. We'd heard this was a city you should only spend a couple of days in, which proved good advice. VT is fairly expensive, and there wasn't a lot to do for a backpacker, except look at some (more) wats, and go to the Buddha Park, which was a bizzare park full of Buddhist and Hindu statues landscaped by an eccentric sculpture enthusiast. We spent the good part of a day deliberating over whether to fork out a lot of money to fly 1 and a half hours to Hanoi, or whether to pay a measley 9 pounds and endure a 26 hour local bus journey. We, and two Dutch girls, Aniek and Nicole who we had been travelling with, decided there was strength in numbers, and went for the bus. If you research this particular bus journey on the internet, you'll see all sorts of horror stories about the 'bus journey from hell' etc.etc. While it is true that it uses the dodgiest and remotest border crossing from Laos to Vietnam, we really didn't find it particularly harrowing (but not exactly recommeneded).
Hanoi was a bit of a shock for us, coming from a pretty peaceful Laos. We were a further furhter North again, so the weather was worse (sometimes rainy), and there was more pollution than we were used to. Hanoi is a massive sprawling city of motorbikes and more motorbikes. Apparently 22 people a day die in RTA's in Vietnam, and it's not hard to see why. Drivers in Vietnam just their horns as a defense mechanism, which can mean anything from watch-out-I'm-coming-through to ok-I'll-let-you-go-through to in-two-minutes-I'll-be-overtaking-you etc. etc., which gets pretty irritating. We decided, after a confusing ramble around the Ho Chi Minh complex (the mausoleum was closed in the afternoons, we missed yet ANOTHER embalmed body!), and a hair raising but really fun motorcycle taxi back inot town, to book a 3 day trip to Halong Bay, which is to the north of Hanoi on the South China Sea. We had heard this was a beautiful spot, and it was. There were hundreds and hundreds of tourist boats though, and we saw a couple of crashes. We stayed the first night on the boat after crusing and kayaking around the bay. The second day we alighted on CatBa island and had a 2 hour trek through the national park up one of the mountains. The view would have been spectacular had the weather not been pretty bad, but we were still glad we did it. We then went to Monkey Island, where our guide said we'd be lucky to see some monkeys, but we timed our outing perfectly and got to see a whole family of them being fed bananas by tourists on the beach, one of which attacked amy for attacking its baby (I should probably state now a retraction from the previous entry, Amy does not hate animals, she just didn't feel like going to the zoo). The second night we were put up in a nice hotel on CatBa, and spent the evening seeing in Amy's 22nd birthday in a karaoke bar (Vietnam loves karaoke).
Unfortunately Amy's bithday involved a lot of travelling - we could have spent it in Hanoi, but decided it would be better to push on to a prettier, quieter place and have a big night out there instead. So we had lunch in our favourite Vietnamese vegetarian cafe and got on the 12 hour horn-happy bus to Hue, where we are now. We have a 4 hour stop over here until our connecting bus to Hoi An, about 4 hours away from here. We've heard very good thins about Hoi An, and it seems the perfect place for us to catch our breath and get in a bit of rest before the big GI beach resort of Nha Trang, which is our next stop. After that it's Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta, before heading to Cambodia.
I've probably missed some stuff out, but I think that's the bare bones of what we've been up to. We'll try and write more often so it's not such a mammoth task when we eventually get round to it... I've got to go pay a horrific internet cafe bill now! Take care, and as always, keep in touch
Love Louise and a 22 year old Amy xxx

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