Our bus arrived at Pakse where we were told we had an 8 hour wait for the connecting bus. With tired minds and bodies we sunk into the plastic chairs in the waiting area to wait.
 As we sat there daydreaming and drifting in and out of conversation we were shocked to see Frenchy and Tom disembarking from their bus. After only 5 hours we were reunited!
The boys decided to come with us to vang vieng and we set off on a 4 hour long winding bus ride without anything resembling air conditioning. What a delight!
I imagine 10 years ago that Vang Vieng was a lovely little village with a couple of places to eat, bamboo bridges over to the smaller islands surrounding it, kids going to school, weekend trips to the caves and a sense of nothing big ever happening. 
Vang Vieng is still a small town, but lining the streets are open plan restaurants with cushions to lie on and tables for the western food served, wih each place blaring either family guy or episodes of friends on loop on widescreen televisions. The streets are lined with fast food kiosks selling crepes, sandwiches and fruit shakes. 
The main clientele are in their early 20s and are there to get completely wasted while meandering down the river on inner tubes, dropping in on the bars along the way to consume mushroom shakes and buckets- yes buckets - of Lao Lao and coke. As the Lao Lao is a lot cheaper than coke, the ratio of this local wiskey to coke leads to a potent mix that I'm sure would floor an elephant.
The bars have swings and slides into the river, which would be amazing to use, but as it's dry season, they are terribly dangerous, however the mix of drugs and alcohol lead the general public to believe they are invincible. Every year there is at least one death and probably about 365 extremely bad injuries due to his stupidity.

As Luck would have it, although at the time we were devestated, it rained a cold, unpredictably strong rain throughout our trip. Tubing was cancelled for us. Ah well, I like my life and limbs, so as I said, it was a blessing in disguise!

Saving grace for Vang Vieng- the caves! We were still with Frenchy, so passing the time sitting on our bottoms was not an option! He roused the troops and we all donned our warm waterproofs and embarked upon a 6 hour hike to the caves. We waded through rivers, cut across private fields and pushed our way through overgrown jungle to get to the caves where we explored with our dim head torches careful not to look at the walls which at times teamed with interesting insects to which we were in extremely close proximity! So much fun was had that day, and as I wrote all of our initials on a cave wall (with clay or something similar) and signed it with the date and "wolfpack", I really felt a great affinity for our family. 

That night I experienced a bucket first hand and the less said about that the better.
The rest of the time in Vang Vieng was spent reading, walking around and waiting for the crappy weather to pass. It didn't, so we did! 
The last night together we pushed the three beds together and Cat, Tom, Lisa, Frenchy, Raechelle and I had a sleepover and watched a beautiful french film 'the choir'. It was such a beautiful end to our time together. 
The next day the girls made 

 I wroth that about 2 weeks ago, but wanted to finish it before i posted, oh well! It's been such a long time since i wrote anything here- which is just a sign of personal journalling, writing emails or just having too much to do! It's not that I don't want to keep these updates going, i know I'll appreciate them in the long run. 

So...The girls left to Luang Prabang, which is in the north of Lao. ( or Laos if you prefer!)
The ride was..well it felt like we were travelling on a road made of soggy spaghetti, designed like one of those "follow the squiggly line and find Fido a bone" puzzles. The rain had been coming down in droves and the road was at times seemingly impossible to drive on, but where there's a will, there's a way, and our driver certainly had a will!
We arrived 3 hours after our ETA cold to the bone, desperate for a wee and utterly miserable. After the túk túk driver tried (and succeeded somewhat) to rip us off we arrived at a hostel and collapsed into bed.


*in the travelling sense where everything is so temporal yet feels so permanent