Sabaidee! I know this blog is very late but Laos has that effect on a person. They call Laos the "Land of a Thousand Elephants". I'm not so sure about that, we only saw about 5. But the country definitely lives up to it's reputation of being the most unspoilt and friendly land in SE Asia. We spent a throroughly enjoyable 3 weeks travelling through the country eating sticky rice and drinking the superb Beer Lao, in the company of our new Swiss friends. We met Karin and Marcel during our border crossing and they became our travel companions through Laos. More relaxed and perhaps more reserved than their Khmer neighbours, the people of Laos really are a "great bunch of lads". It's only too easy to lose track of time here. Crossing the border gave ... read more

With great reluctancy we left Saigon and Vietnam and boarded yet another bus for yet another interminable journey, this time to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Our collective knowledge of Cambodia was limited more or less to what we heard about the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970's and also embarrassingly enough that Tomb Raider was filmed there.. Well not long after the bus crossed over the border into Cambodia and had a quick rest stop, we had our first taste of the extreme poverty and desparation that there is here. Street children surrounded the bus, carrying their wares for sale. They were all very young, very dirty and behaved like little wild animals-fighting with each other, biting and kicking. There was no adult anywhere to stop them or take care of them, in fact infants were ... read more

From one beach on to another...Anyone would think we are on holidays and not hardcore cheapass backpackers. Well it wasn't quite a direct move. We went via the mountain town of Dalat, a favourite of Vietnamese honeymooners. Apparently they like pissing rain and cockroach infested hotels. True Romance. We stayed one night. The image of the cockroach on its back, legs in the air like some ham actor will stay with me forever. Vile Hotel. Boring town. I'm wondering how to pad out the blog entry for Mui Ne. We stayed 8 nights in total, quite a long time. But we were very lazy people... We had a little bamboo bungalow on the beach. Nice and basic, no aircon, no hot water, just a mosquito net, fan and cold shower. The beach in Mui Ne is ... read more

And down south we go... After leaving Halong Bay bang on time to avoid Typhoon Lekima we had a night bus journey ahead of us to reach Hue, the ancient imperial capital of Vietnam. Having been deeply traumatised by the Chinese sleeper bus experience and beds that could only fit Chinese people and contortionists we were quite happy to be on a regular seat aircon coach. The 16 hour journey wasn't too bad, or perhaps we're just hardcore slummers at this point. Hard to tell. We had barely begun to descend the steps out of the bus when the touts arrived en masse like locusts. We were too tired to put up a fight and allowed ourselves to be led down an alley to a rather non-descript looking hotel. We weren't expecting much, but we managed ... read more

So after the drama that was the Tiger Leaping Gorge we had to backtrack to get onto our chosen route. This involved a high speed 3 hour bus journey back to Dali (including 2 nights at the Chateau de Filth, which we decided we really do love). Then another action packed bus journey (this time 5 hours) to Kunming and one night at the Camellia Hotel (of dodgy breakfast buffet fame). Thankfully we were able to procure our tickets to Guilin quite quickly, and one pretty non eventful hard sleeper experience and 2 hour bus ride later we reached Yangshuo, one of the most popular tourist towns in Southern China. It's yet another small, somewhat tacky town set to a backdrop of beautiful scenery. Vintage China really. We arrived in Yangshuo on September 8th and with ... read more