An 8.00am start for what looked to be a packed itinerary. Our tour guide was a local gentleman called Addy and my travel companions 5 Italians and a family of 4 Spaniards. The first stop for the day was the White temple. Most Thai temples are very colourful things covered in red, gold and green as Boy George used to sing. Anyway this particular temple was in a very poor state and in need of major renovation when a local artist, named Chalumchai, approached the village elders and proposed rebuilding it providing he could paint it white. The elders agreed and the outcome is one of the most stunningly beautiful buildngs I have seen on my travels, a real architectural gem. The next stop was the Black House, known as Baan Dam in Thai, actually a ... read more

Had to drag myself sorry carcass out of bed at 5.00am to be ready for a 6.00am pickup and 7.00am departure on the Louang say, a sort of luxury version of the slow boats that plough their way from Luang Prabang to Houay Xai about 170km to the north on the Thai border. We were a little late getting under way as we were waiting for a French couple but after 15 minutes the captain gave the call and we left without them. The Mekong river boats are long, low sleek things that seem to glide effortlessly either up or downstream. There were only half a dozen passengers on board so I found a handy banquette and sprawled out. A breakfast of croissants, baguette, bananas etc was served shortly after we left then our first stop ... read more

24 hours consuming nothing but bread and water seemed to cure whatever ailed me so I stopped in at a nice place on the main street for scrambled eggs, a baguette and a pot of English breakfast tea. Gave the pho a miss this morning just in case. The weather had even rained itself out over night. I was supposed to head off to see the elephants at 8.30 but apparently everyone sleeps late around here as I was the only one booked so they asked could I move it to 10.30. Given they had agreed to the delay yesterday I figured another couple of hours wouldn't hurt and took the opportunity to do my regular lap of the main street and back along the Mekong river bank with a stop for a coconut milkshake at ... read more

At 7.00am I was picked up by a slightly larger version of a tuktuk, but smaller than a songteau, the trucks that double as taxis. The rain that had promised for the last two days had arrived in the night. Not the thunderous, heavy downpours you get in the southern parts, more like the gentle rain that droppeth from heaven that we are used to, with apologies to Billy Shakespeare. The tuktuk picked up a number of passengers for the Luang Prabang bus and deposited us all at the Northern bus terminal about 7km out of town. The bus was a bright yellow double decker with the driver and luggage on the ground floor and passengers on the upper deck. We departed precisely at 8.00am for what was billed as an 8 hour trip. We weren't ... read more

After a really good Pad Thai and a couple of beer lao at a makeshift restaurant on the Mekong waterfront last night I decided to walk off the calories today. My first port of call was the COPE visitors centre. The Cooperative orthotic and prosthetic enterprise is a non-profit organisation that provides care and support to UXO survivors. The visitors centre educates about the devastating consequences of war and it's hard to think of a more fitting place than Laos to do so. Between 1964 and 1973 the US army dropped over 2,000,000 tons of ordnance on Laos making it the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Of the over 270 million sub-munitions dropped 80 million failed to explode. Cluster munitions, bomb casings containing up to 200 smaller 'bombies' were designed to explode on ... read more