Blogs from Laos, Asia - page 517

Greetings from Laos! I've just checked the BBC website and found out about the coup in Thailand - don't worry we're miles away from there (in a different country) and won't be re-entering Thailand for a good couple of weeks yet, hopefully it'll have calmed down by then! Anyway, it's just me today, so I apologise in advance for any bad jokes, because Jill is currently in bed feeling a bit flu-ee! But she is on the mend, which is good! Last time we left you we were in Chiang Mai. From there we travelled upto Chiang Khong, on the border with Laos, by bus - including 2 hours on the local bus which was a bone rattling experience and quite scary - i decided to stop looking out of the driver's window when he started ... read more

A long long time ago... I went with Nami and Phanlany on a field trip to Khua District, Phongsali Province. (Udomxai was the closest out of the available location list...and we flew there...accepted?) It was the first time for me leaving my secure and compfortable VTE. We took the plane to U, where we got picked up. A 3 hours drive followed. Windy roads (which undoubtfully did not pass the criteria for acceptable streets of a german girl...) leading to places back in time. Life can't have possible been any different a hundred years back. That's as well for the road-side villages we were passing as the final ones I visited with Phanlany. Khua District, where our office is located, is a tiny place, which does get the occasional backpacker (...lost ones?!?). Our original plan of ... read more

Having been in Laos for almost a month I needed to do something to either extend or renew my 30 day visa, and passing through Savannakhet, a town on the Mekong that is also a border crossing to Thailand I decided it would be fun to go to Thailand for a couple of hours and then on reentering the country buy a new visa for Laos... I'm really glad I renewed my visa rather than getting an extension, as going to Thailand for a couple of hours was a lot of fun! Crossing the Mekong on a boat, there seemed to be a lot of Lao people who were heading to Mukdahan in Thailand - when I arrived there I realised why - the shopping in Thailand is fantastic compared to Laos. The town on the ... read more

Hi All OK, I have a LOT to write about, yet I don't want to waste the entire night at the computer. So... I'll try to give an abbreviated version. I left off last at Luang Prabang, which was an amazing place. The day after my last check in I took a private guided tour through the Laos 'outback'. It really is something else. I got a first hand look at how the people live over there. A family of five will live in a one room bamboo hut, if they're luckily it's on the river, and eat fish they catch from the water using spears made from a bamboo stick with a sharpened rock at the end. Unbelievable. The thing is, is that they all seem VERY happy, all smiling at you and trying to ... read more

Nong Kiaw is just 96 km up the river from Luang Prabang and I had heard the boat trip was stunning, so even though it takes only 3.5 hours by bus, I decided to take the boat, which I was told would take 8 hours - but turned out to be more like 10 - including a stop at a local whisky manufacturing (re tourist) village, and then later a breakdown and subsequent stop on a river bank to repair the boat. Luckily I was travelling with great people - Sarah and Russell and by coincidence another English girl who I met in Vang Vieng as well - as well as 2 Canadian guys and another Londoner. But although there was great company on the boat, and there weren't too many people on board, it did ... read more