Even after deciding that our best course of action would be to head north to the border crossing near Muang Khua, we didn’t actually finalize that until early in the morning at the bus station on a hill above Sam Neua. We stood there with some new friends, backpacks sitting in the dust, and tried…

Sam Neua was supposed to be our gateway to Vietnam but fate (and the Vietnamese New Year, aka Tet) had other plans. Knowing that Tet has the tendency to shut down Vietnam, we arrived in Sam Neua with four days to spare before the holiday actually started. We had four days instead of five because,…

After a grueling 10 hour bus ride from Luang Prabang (complete with blaring Thai/Lao pop music, vomiting Laotians, and chickens), we arrived in Phonsavan. The main reason to visit Phonsavan is to see the Plain of Jars–thousands of gigantic, ancient jars scattered across many different large areas of land. There are over 90 sites of…

People have been periodically asking me what my favorite place has been that we have traveled to so far  and after over 150 days of traveling I think that I can truthfully say that it is this: Luang Prabang, Laos. I had never even heard of Luang Prabang until we got to Laos and read…

We entered Laos on January 12th, 2014. It’s not a country that I ever expected to visit and I’m very glad that we did. It’s the least developed of the places that we’ve been to so far but it has some of the warmest and friendliest people that we’ve met so far. The country only…