Laos as in Louse or Laos as in Cow? 

The Internet is telling me it’s ‘Louse’; I’ve only ever heard ‘L-ow’. Evening from Vang Vieng, Laos.

We left Vietnam over a week ago and since I’m hopelessly behind on blogging different places we’ve been to, I thought I’d say hi in real time before we head back into Thailand. Assuming everything goes to plan, we’ll be home in the UK in a month and I’m conflicted. On the one hand, I miss my dogs, family and showers without strangers’ hair in the plug. On the other, I’m just starting to understand how Asian traffic works.

I’m looking forward to returning to Thailand (an elephant sanctuary! A dog sanctuary! At least one beach!) but I’ll be sorry to leave Laos. It’s the poorest of the four countries we’ve visited, with the worst roads and the most squatting toilets, but it also might be the friendliest and most relaxed (which is no mean feat; South East Asians give the Greeks a run for their money in the ‘chilled out attitude’ stakes). The country’s official name is Laos People’s Democratic Republic, and one leaflet I saw joked that PDR actually stands for Please Don’t Rush. Possibly we’ve been in Asia long enough to actually get that, because in Luang Prabang we watched the sun set over the Mekong:

I took a minute from packing to leave Phonsavan to catch a bit of the sunrise:

I even appreciated the boarder crossing’s freezing, Cold War-era, horror film set ambiance at 7am and partway through a 25.5 hour bus journey…

That could have been down to the diazepam I took the night before, though.