Of course our plane landed safely (as you might have guessed already).

Vientiane is a busy and developing city. One feels the French influence. Lots of NGO's about the place, and also lots of 'falang' people (foreigners). We arrived a couple days prior to the first international convention on the abolition of cluster ammunition, hosted by Laos. We saw children exercise for the opening ceremony and visited an exhibition showing art from local artists, whose art was heavily inspired by the harsh effects of cluster ammunition. We stayed in a run-down and a bit eerie guesthouse, but at least it was quiet. We weren't in the mood to do any sightseeing at all, instead we went bowling - fun! Lasse and Sil experienced an evening of their live with two older Dutch ladies who were really interested in them and in their stories about our travel adventures so far. They were talking the whole evening and we all had a very enjoyable evening, sharing whine and lots of laughs.

From Vientiane, we took a VIB-bus to Thakek, a Laos border town along the Mekong (the river keeps coming back to us, or is it the other way around?). We arrived in the dark, the first guesthouse was full (our pick from the Lonely Planet), so we were carted by our tuk-tuk driver to another guesthouse - an awfully dirty and smelly place. The kind of place where one tries to be as small as possible, so that your body doesn't have to touch anything. We left again the next morning and found a nice guesthouse for one more night. Thakek was not much of an interesting place, we did, however, thoroughly enjoy two evenings of Asian-style BBQ. This is where you have the BBQ on the table and you cook meat in the centre, while all around there is a place to boil mushrooms, noodles and vegetables in bouillon. Very tasty and very nice to do, especially Lasse and Sil enjoyed being chefs.

Now, it was time to go back to Thailand as our one month visa for Laos had nearly expired. The past months we have gained so much new images, experiences, met so many new people and so many new cultures and traditions. It is time for a short break, just staying at one place and let our minds come to rest a little. We crossed the Mekong in a long tail boat, and we arrived in Nakom Phanom at the Thai side. We stood there, a little bit lost, trying to make up our mind: stay here, or move on? We decided to move straight on to That Phanom. This turned out to be a good choice. We found a nice, apartment-style room; it's good to have some extra space. On our first afternoon, we bumped into Clive from Australia and his friend Barry from the UK, both pensioners enjoying the good life in Thailand. Barry put us in contact with a local car dealer, from who we could rent a car for a week. Just our luck, as renting a car is virtually impossible in this part of Thailand, as there are no official car rentals. Having a car allowed us to do some sight-seeing around That Phanom. We visited rapids in the Mekong, searched in vain for waterfalls, went to a site with dinosaur footprints and passed through many small villages along the way.

In That Phanom we also had the time and piece-of-mind to plan the remainder of our time in Asia. We have been wondering whether we should go to Vietnam or not, having heard some very bad stories and little good ones. Finally we decided to form an opinion for ourselves. So the scheme from here on will be: back to Laos for 3 to 4 weeks, then to Cambodia for a month, on to Vietnam for 3 to 4 weeks, 2 weeks Malaysia and 1 week in Singapore, before we head to New Zealand on March 1, 2011.

See you again in Laos!