We slept well despite it being a very warm night and the hotel having no air conditioning!! Even though we power napped during the afternoon, we managed to sleep through until about five this morning. We didn't think this was too bad in terms of adjusting to local time. With most museums not opening until 10.00am we were not in a rush to get going. I worked on my travel diary until about 8.00am and then we showered and went down to breakfast. Considering that the hotel is only costing €73.00/night the breakfast buffet was quite a spread catering to all tastes with Asian, European and English options available. After leaving our bags in the hotel's luggage room we caught the tram to Willy-Brandt-Platz again. This time we walked though the gardens that follow the line ... read more

In a first for us, we sourced house sitters from the Happy House Sitters website to look after the house and dogs during this trip. They coped OK with being put in kennels for three weeks last year, but we were reluctant to kennel Gidget and Finbar for seven weeks. Not being able to identify relatives or friends to take on the house/dog minding this year, we turned to the Internet. What a wonderful tool it is helping to match up people with properties available to be sat with people who are willing to house/dog sit!! Kerry dropped us at the airport and, in return, will look after our car for the next few weeks and then meet us at the airport when we return. After a quick coffee with us, she waved us off at ... read more

After a couple of days out and about we spent today exploring Luang Prabang a bit more. We thought that we should explore a couple of the wats because the considerable number of Buddhist temples is one of the things for which Luang Prabang is famous. We started early, getting up at 6.15am so that we could observe the monk’s morning alms taking. The monks come past the Lotus Villa each morning as part of the devotional ceremony where the local villagers give rice to the monks. There was advice in our room about how to observe this ritual appropriately. That advice told us that we should be respectfully dressed, as for visiting any of the wats, and we should endeavour to keep ourselves lower than the monks and ensure that we did not touch the ... read more

We had an early start today. We needed to meet our ‘Tiger Tours’ guide for today’s tour at 8.30am at Cafe 56 which is right at the other end of town! We allowed 20 minutes to walk to the other end of town, which was enough time to walk right past the cafe which now goes by a different name. Very helpful, not! Anyway, we were right out of cafes so we thought we must have missed it so we doubled back to the cafe with other westerners out the front at 8.30am! On a tiny chalkboard it did say that Cafe 56 is now known as Cafe Namphou (or something like that). Our guide for the day, Cha, introduced himself and took us over to a big tuk tuk (on the back of a ute ... read more

This morning we got up to have our breakfast with Kerry before she went to work. It is a big day at COPE today with an ANZ banking executive flying in from Hanoi to hand over a cheque. All the staff had to be there for the photo op!!! Despite some hassles with the entire telephone network being congested this morning Kerry managed to get onto her driver, Om, so that he could collect us and our luggage for the trip to the airport. He arrived right on time at 10.15am and had us at the airport in about 15 minutes. It takes no time at all too get around here - just 15 minutes from out in the suburbs all the way over to the airport on the other side of town!! We arrived in ... read more