I Like Dirt

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Luang Prabang is a slightly strange city. It's a UNISCO world heritage site (which should put it on a level with the Fjordlands of NZ and the prehistoric jungle of Australia, among others) and we had and still do hear really good things about it but it really didn't do it for us. Don't get me wrong it was a nice enough little town, but that was about it, we spent the end of the first day recovering, the second wandering around the city looking at the various wats (buddhist temples) and the national museum (in the old royal palace), which was nice enough but completely failed to mention the American war on Laos which dropped 1 tonne of bombs for every one of the 3 million inhabitants of Laos, making it the most bombed country on earth, or even illude to it, strange. On the second day we tried to head out of town but it was very very hot and we were unable to get out of the never ending dust and litter strewn suburbs.
It was an OK town but we were pretty happy to be heading south to the backpackers' playground of Vang Vieng.
It's difficult to sum up the roads of Laos, but i shall try. Get 20 of your closets friends in a very muddy field in cars and vans; fill the field with pot holes and rocks, goats, chickens, cows, water buffalo, children, chicken etc etc now drive at one another for 9 hours loudly honking your car horn every time you come near any obstacle. Sound like fun? No, no it isn't.
Vang Vieng was a lot of fun the first night we just got a couple drinks the 2 of us, then the next day we went 'tubing'. People die doing it regularly; someone gives you a tractor inner-tube drives you 4km up the road and you then float down the river; except ever couple hundred meters someone throws you a rope and pulls you into a (very cheap) bar and at said bar there will be zip-lines swings and high jumps into fast flowing water (hence the death) as well as ping-pong, football, volley-ball and mud wrestling. It was, to say the least an absolutely incredible experience and we escaped with nothing more than a scraped knee or two and spent the evening in another bar (not on the river edge) massaging our aching muscles.
Feeling bad because we'd just been on the tourist trail for a few days we decided to make our way off the beaten track to the town of Phosavan which was extensively bombed by the Americans and also home to 'The Plain Of Jars', 5000 huge granite pots a couple thousand years old that dot the landscape around bomb craters and unexploded bombs. Although the town itself was a bit of a hole we ended up stuck there for an extra day because we had to wait for the bus to the Vietnamese town of Vihn.
We got on the bus at 6.30am and trundled our way to the Laos border where we had to check out of Laos and physically walk across no-man's land to the Vietnamese side (something neither of us have ever done before) and then back onto the bus, which then made it's way through the Vietnamese countryside. We stopped off at a dusty backwater town which appears to never get white kids. Alice and I had our pictures taken several times and Alice had her topped looked down by a middle aged lady who was stunned at the size of her breasts. We eventually arrived in Vihn where we had dinner and beer for 30p each and then got an 11pm bus to Hanoi, arriving at 5am (that was 18 out of 24 hours on a bus).
Hanoi is insane there are millions of motor-bikes and everyone leans on their horn CONSTANTLY. It is way way too much after coming out of sleepy Laos

Chris and Alice

ps once again due to the computers over here we're unable to upload photos, you'll all just have to wait and see...

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