Update

Hi everyone. We hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Sorry we haven't been able to update the blog since we left Vientiane. So here's the update...from Vientiane we caught an overnight bus to Pakse then decided to continue on so we took 5 songthaews and a boat to Champasak. Champasak was a very small town so we hired bicycles and went out to Wat Phu Champasak, a beautiful pre-Angkor temple on top of the mountain. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and was built from the 6-13th century. A nearby museum has collected stone sculptures from the site but there are still several left in the temple.

From Champasak we went to Don Khong in the 4000 islands where we spent Christmas Day. We found a little guesthouse where a Lao woman baked a turkey dinner, it was fantastic!

The next day we took a minibus to the Cambodian border. It was down a dirt path with a wooden shed on either side. We were lucky and only had to bribe them 3 USD each to stamp our passports. From the border we took another mini bus to Stung Treng where we decided to go to Ban Lung, Ratanakiri. The dirt road was really bad but we got there. We spent 4 nights in Ban Lung. The first day we rode bicycles down the dirt roads out to the crater lake. It was a really nice place to swim but we were orange from the dust by the time we got back. The next day we went out to a Chunchiet Cemetery, which is the cemetery of the Tompuon minority. Family groups are buried together in the forest under a shelter with life like wooden effigies and carved elephant tusks on either side. These included pregnant women, women wearing jewelery and men wearing police uniforms, a mobile phone, revolver and sunglasses. On the way back we stopped at a 200 year old Chinese and Lao village. On our final day, we went elephant trekking. It was so fun! It took 3 hours to go through the rubber plantations, to the waterfall and back again.

We left Ban Lung and got a crazy bus driver going back. He was going so fast and the road was full of potholes that we were airbourne 4 times, this was made worse because the seats weren't secured to the floor. Thank God we finally made it to Kratie. Kratie was a nice little town on the Mekong River. We spent 2 nights there and took motos out in the afternoon to see the freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins. Although they are rare we saw alot of them.
Yesterday we got up early to get the bus to Phnom Penh. After 20 minutes the driver pulled over and the assistant grabbed the tool kit. We knew this wasn't a good sign. He continued on another 10 minutes before pulling over, turning off the ignition and yelling "smoke!". Oh my God the bus was on fire in the middle of nowhere!!! Everyone got off and sat on the side of the road for about an hour, until another bus came to pick everyone up, except us! "No worry, another car coming in 10 minutes". Well another car didn't come, but 2 more hours later another overloaded bus came by and we crammed on. The trip that should have taken about 5 hours ended up taking 10 1/2 hours. We were so glad to get here! We walked over to the restaurant where the kids from the orphanage we saw last time do their dancing. The staff remembered us and they brought out 2 of the children to see if they remembered us too. They did and one of them recited everything in a Christmas present we had given all the children last year. Then all the children came out to see us and told us they missed us.

Today we went to the market to get presents for the kids and we are going to see them again tomorrow.