At the Thai Border we flashed our brightest smiles to try and get out of
the overstay fine but to no avail. We had to pay £10 each which we thought was
quite steep as that works out at about 4 meals!
We got in a little longtail boat to take us the 3 minute ride to the Laos
Border across the Mekong River.
Laos seemed to have a bit of everything to offer us- really beautiful
scenery, pretty little French inspired towns, tubing and everything was cheap!
Our first stop was the little, rather
uninteresting town of Huay Xai but it was from here that we went on the Gibbons
Experience (an ecotourism project- meaning it was really expensive!)- where we
trekked into the jungle for 3 hours and then for 3 days trekked and ziplined on
wires 150m+ high and up to 500m long. (Please see the video of Mr Morley on
facebook).
The drop out of the 2nd treehouse- the one we later had to do at 4am in the pitch black!
One of the treehouses
On the last day we decided to all get up at 4am
to try and see some of the gibbons but especially to hear them sing… so we
zipped in the pitch black of the jungle, jumping out of our treehouse from a
tiny little ledge 200m high. Absolutely incredible- AND we got to hear the
gibbons sing and caught a few glimpses.
Our Gibbons Experience Group
After a few hard days of trekking and general craziness, we headed to the
beautiful, but lazy town of Luang Prabang- where no matter what time of day, if
you went into any kind of shop and wanted to but something you would have to
wake up the shopkeeper to pay for it!!
Procession of monks in the town at 6am
From Luang Prabang we went to Vang Vieng to do the standard tubing affair- where lots of English people rent a big tube get dropped to the top of a river and get drunk by stopping at all the bars on the side of the river whilst floating down it! It was good fun but it was dead quiet because of the low season.
Then we went to Vientiane the capital of Laos and did some sight seeing and lots of eating of croissants!
We hope that you're satisfied with the update and are very sorry for the lack of comedy in the post- anything amusing was sort of you had to be there (alhtough Shauna will of course claim this as her lack of input)- however coming very soon is the the episode of
Wayne vs. Monkey.
Not to be missed.
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(Thank you for the title Jaconelli)
