Northern Laos Leaves us SPEECHLESS

We are left speechless by the extraordinary beauty of Lao which makes it somewhat difficult to write the blog! So, I'll let most of the story unfold through the pictures I have uploaded to www.flickr.com/r1ch and instead, I'll focus on trying to complete the picture for you.

We headed north from Vientiane to Vang Vieng which is about 5 hours by bus. Leaving the Mekong plains, it soon became apparent that Lao is actually a very mountainous country and that the landscape around Vientiane (basically flat) is the unusual one. The journey is only about 200km, which ought to be about 2 hours, but then you understand that the road is narrow and you head over several mountain passes. There were many times when the bus was only able to travel at 2mph.

We stayed in a great hotel with a lovely infinity swimming pool that you can see in the picture. The view from our balcony, and indeed from the pool itself is one to die for with amazingly vertiginous pinnacle'y (new word!) peaks rising directly from the rice paddies.

The river here is spanned by these strange looking footbridges which bounce ominously as you traverse them all the more aware that the bridges only operate in the dry season and I would guess they're dismantled as soon as the raining season starts. I say footbridges, because they're only just wide enough for a person to walk and passing other people is interesting as the bamboo handrails aren't exactly near and they're definitely not strong enough to support you if you were to lean on them! But the amazing thing is that the locals nip across on bicycles and motorbikes - suicide if you ask me, especially as the planks on which you walk aren't even complete!

We did a long walk over the river to engage more deeply with the scenery which also involved a spot of climbing and caving. As we had both brought our lovely expensive Petzl headtorches, the caving was planned to be great and we were feeling adventurous. Well when we got to the caves, despite a thorough search of the rucsack, there were no headtorches - BUM! So we had to rely on the local flickering nightmares! But, the caves were interesting and because they were quite a climb and scramble up the cliffs, the view was worth it too.

We walked in the heat for a few km and eventually found a very rickety cafe and stopped for a nice lunch and a cold drink. An amazing day indeed.

But just when we thought that Vang Vieng was the most amazing place in the universe, we had to leave as we had only booked 2 nights and our hotel in Luang Prabang was awaiting our arrival. We both blame the Lonely Planet guide that says that Vang Vieng is basically rubbish - how wrong were they - we're coming back!

On the plus side, the 7 hour bus journey to Luang Prabang was absolutely stunning. We went over several mountain passes all reminiscent of some of the largest alpine ones. I reckon the country here is more mountainous that Switzerland and the mountains themselves are even more beautiful. All throughout the journey, strange shaped mountains loomed over us - what a day yesterday was! We really are the luckiest guys to see all this before it gets too touristed.

Oh and one last piece of spice... the Lonely Planet guide also says that there have been many shootings along the route we were travelling along! Fortunately, the only shootings were from me pointing the camera out the window! Take a look at Flickr!