BeccaLou

Good morning. Yesterday evening after I finished the latest entry on here I went to meet the others for dinner which is when we all realised about the typhoon that has hit Asia. We are all fine and we don't expect to be affected by it. To clear a few things up. We are currently in Laos in the capital Vientiane. We left Vietnam two days ago and seem to have just missed the floods there. We were not aware of the situation because we have had two days of long travelling and have not seen any news until yesterday evening. We spent our first night in Laos in Lac Sao which experienced a power cut for the majority of the time that we were there. We now know that this was due to the flooding ... read more

I'm just going to repeat again in case you didn't spot it in the last blog that we are all fine and have not been on a glass bottomed boat. It was about a four hour bus ride to Hue and once we arrived we went for lunch. Following this we got in a taxi and a local guide took us for a tour of the Citadel and the Forbidden City. It was very beautiful despite the weather continuing to be drizzly. The tour guide was very informative, we learnt a lot about the monarchy and how it followed along with the French control of Vietnam and then with the Vietnam war. We went to the temple where most of the monarchs remains are along with each of their beds and some personal belongings! After this ... read more

Hello. I thought I'd mention the group because I don't know if I have really since the other guys left. We are very culturally diverse! One American, two Canadians, one Chinese, one German (this is a new German girl - the other two left), one Norwegian, one Danish, one Finnish, and one Brit. By the time we get to Laos it will be five people representing five nationalities! Anyway Nha Trang was gorgeous! It is a coastal town and after our early arrival at 5am (we mere meant to be arriving later so we had a mad scramble to get off the train within five mins before it departed to the next stop which resulted in me getting a friction burn on my finger from launching myself off the top bunk!) we went for breakfast and ... read more

So we left Sihanoukville at 7 30 this morning. It was throwing it down again so much that the power kept cutting out so I don't think there was a boat trip for the other group today either. We had a four hour drive to the border and then crossed over to Vietnam. Once there it was a 45min drive to Caudoc which is pretty much on the Mekong Delta. Once we had checked in a local guide took us to the river where we went on a tour on a local boat. First we went to a fish farm where the fish are kept untill six months old untill the eat them. The fish are actually bought over from Cambodia because there is pretty much no fish in the Mekong any more due to unsustainable ... read more

Today there was also a lot of travelling. I laid in till 11 30 and then had to get on the bus at 12. I was very hungover and didn't feel that great on the bus at all! Luckily by 3pm I was feeling ok again and couldn't wait to get to Phnom Penh. When we arrived we freshened up and then headed off for dinner. This was a really special evening as a tour guide called Ron had invited us to his home for dinner and to talk about the Cambodian genocide before we visited S21 and the killing fields the next day. There is a school underneath his house and we had hoped to spend some time with the children before dinner but due to the monsoon it was flooded. On the way there ... read more