I'm in a world of shit... yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.

Helen eventually woke me up at about seven and we grabbed all of our stuff and crashed next door into a room that had a toilet. 

I went and told the manager what we had done and he actually seemed truly concerned about her, even offering to drive us to the hospital about half an hour away. I said that she should be fine, and we tried to get a little more sleep.

After half an hour it was obvious this wasn't going to happen and I went out on the search for some rehydration tablets or powder, which I got from a pharmacist not too far away.

As it turned out, the next three days were to be the biggest festival of the year in Luang Prabang, and throughout the day people were setting up stalls for food, drink, games and toys for children, preliminary long-tail races were crashing through the river that we were right on top of and there was a general feeling of excitement and fun from everyone in the town. Helen, however, was just feeling like shit.

I tried to be the best nurse I could, and by the late afternoon the worst of it had passed. The posse that had been on the bus with us were meeting up at six for a meal, and I told them that we may be able to make it if Hel felt any better.

During the day I went in search of the hostel that we had originally planned to stay in, Ed and Nicky had planned to be there and we had also told Helen's mate Tori from the University hockey team that's where we would be. After a few hours of searching, my incredible sense of direction failing me at every turn, I had walked about four miles, got nicely burned, but had found it.

I asked the lady if we could have a room for the following day, and she replied that we could, all was well. When I rounded the corner on the way back to my own hostel I even bumped into Ed and Nicky. I told them about Helen but said she was on the mend and that we would probably see them tomorrow afternoon.

My walk home was slightly more successful, but was soured by the fact that I bumped into a lad that had shunned the bus and taken the boat. 'It was a great laugh, yeah! It was a bit crowded but the food on the boat was great, we stayed in a wicked little hostel and all had a party, and then we got here about three hours early. How was your bus journey?'

I made his death as painless as I possibly could.

Arriving back at the hostel I found Hel getting dressed, she was obviously feeling a lot better and had had a chat with some of the girls that we were meant to meet for dinner. Right before we went out to meet them though, she took a turn for the worse. 

I actually went out anyway, leaving my poor girlfriend to wallow in a state of emptiness inside and out in the room and went up to meet the guys for a bite. I felt like a bit of a bastard, but as I found out later that night, fate was to have its revenge.

After a nice meal, the name of which I cannot remember but translated as 'The Drunken Mess', essentially a bit of everything thrown together, I went back and tended the best I could to Helen. She'd made a decent recovery, and could take on a bit of liquid now.

We watched a Family Guy that we had downloaded onto Hel's iPod and she drifted off. I, however, did not. I felt slightly queasy to say the least. Within three minutes I had devolved into a baby; pissing, shitting and puking simultaneously, all of which in the quietest possible way as to not wake my sleeping shitstress.

Touché Cosmot.

All night I was in a right two an' eight. This was followed by all day the next day, meaning that I, and again, bless her, Helen, missed out on the absolutely huge celebrations that were going on outside. We could watch about 80 metres of the boat races but that was about all.

We also noticed that Laos children were obsessed by toy guns, and the standard of toy guns was incredible. It looked like there was a child army outside, armed with everything from little pellet-shooting pistols to full on semi-automatic plastic rifles. It was a stark reminder that not so long ago this Communist State had been in a steady flux of war that children of their age would have been fully involved in.

Toy guns are strange.

We also missed the Monks collecting alms (not 'arms' as I first thought someone said, this country's gun-mad, I thought) in the morning, but I was almost glad as the stories we later heard of wanker tourists like ourselves shoving huge cameras in the monks' faces and touching their robes made me glad that I wasn't there to get vicariously embarrassed.

So, the day after the celebrations, we moved on to the other guesthouse, knowing that Ed and Nicky would be back from an elephant Mahout trip the following day, and Helen's mate Tori would be along soon.

There was a veritable heap of things to do in Luang Prabang, bum problems over, we were determined to crack on with them.

When the Boat Comes In (My Advice For You Is To Take It)

So. We'd crossed the river and were officially into Laos.

After a quick panic and a rummage around I found our newly-posed-for passport photos (that look like the kind of smiley geeky photos that appear of now-famous people on 'When they wasn't as famous as what they is now' programmes) and got stamped.

We were now officially, officially in Laos.

It was from here, however, that things started to go ever so slightly wrong.

The plan had been, indeed we had even purchased the tickets, to get a slow boat up the Mekong River to reach Luang Prabang. However, the man who escorted our quite large group of pink tourists to the port told us that we could get a bus, at no extra cost, which would see us in Luang Prabang at eight o'clock that evening.

Sold.

As much as we thought it would be fun to go on a river for two days, we also thought that we would only be spending a fortnight in Laos and that a seventh of the time we were here to be spent getting to the first town would be a bit silly.

(I should also mention that the man selling us the tickets was the Laos version of Joe Lyons, one-time Southampton University Men's Football Club Captain and accomplished Lothario, so I immediately trusted the man. Strange, as I never trusted Joe...)

Besides this, most of the group also said that the bus would be the best option. How fantastically wrong we were.

The dodginess began when Joe, as we'll call him from now on, took our passports from us and gave them to a random man. At this point my voice suddenly changed into that of a Guy Ritchie character, 'Wot you fink you doing with them then, eh?' etc.

Our fellow travellers all started taking pictures of the man with our passports, as if that would then hold up in some kangaroo court when we were all left stranded on the Laos-Thailand border with little more than some Doublemint to our names.

Mounting the songtow to the bus station, only 'five minutes down the road', we thought we had had a touch.

Forty-five minutes later we arrived at the local bus station. Our driver got out, handed our passports to a man that had a face like a bulldog chewing a bee, and disappeared in a cloud of green smoke. Or something to that effect.

We now had no way of getting back to the port, no passports, and seemingly no transport to Luang Prabang. Well, they weren't going to put us on the local bus that was already there, surely? It was pre-war (Crimean), and something fleshy and dead was stuck to the side of it.

The grumpiest-looking man on the planet walked over and gave us back our passports, and we asked in our now perfected broken English of the backtwatter which bus was ours. Winston Churchill pointed to The Munster's wagon. Fuck.

Oh well, we'd been set up, but at least we weren't going to be on an equally clapped out slow boat and we'd be there this evening, supping an ice cold Beer Laos and chomping down on some Lapp chicken.

Only we weren't. 

We sat playing shithead for four hours. We then eventually got on the bus with sixty locals that didn't want us on it, and sat for a further hour before the bus took off - a hundred yards down the road to the petrol station where we waited another half an hour.

I have failed to mention that Helen and I were sat on top of the wheel arch, meaning that I had my knees around my ears and an arse so uncomfortable I felt like I was in some sort of twisted Jennings novel.

Along with every seat being designated, there were plastic stools running down the length of the bus where people were sat in the aisle. 

Our two neighbours were a couple of teenagers who had just finished Thai boxing practice. By the smell of them they had been practicing very hard and very long. And in manure.

It's okay though. We'd be there by eight. Oh, no, wait. We're running about four hours late. So we'll be there about eleven or midnight. That's not too bad. It's not what we'd signed up for, but it's better than the District Line. (Who actually fucking goes to Olympia?)

We were traversing the worst roads that any of us had ever been on. This included, surprisingly, the locals as they too were looking and pointing in astonishment at the landslides, holes and cracks in the road that made what Reeves had to deal with in Superman II look like a tarmac paper cut.


Our driver, who looked just like Party Boy from Jackass, was laughing like a maniac for the entire journey. Well, almost. 

At first it worried us that we had a driver that guffawed harder than Akabusi at seemingly anything, but after a few hours we realised we should be more concerned when he stopped laughing, as this meant he was probably trying to navigate a precipice the size of a small country.


Hours passed, and soon day turned to night. Pitch-black night. In the jungle. With a huge fucking thunderstorm cracking on. Normally, I would have enjoyed such an occurrence like some kind of simple child, but I was so uncomfortable that all pleasure was being converted straight into pain, and with a great rate of interest.

Helen, bless her, accommodated me lying in her lap for a good while, but then, unbelievably, the bus picked up about another ten or so passengers. There were now people standing all the way down the bus, falling all over the place and spitting without aim.

It was midnight and we were still a good hundred miles away from Luang Prabang. 

The German lads we were with were fine, they had been drinking and 'using marijuana' since ten that morning and didn't really have a clue what was going on. The rest of us were agitated but also so tired that perversely we weren't even really looking forward to getting off the bus, as it meant that we'd be in a new town in the middle of the night with nowhere to sleep.

We stopped off at about one in the morning and I had some sticky rice and Hel had some noodle soup. She was made slightly more upbeat by this influx of energy that the grub had given her, I was made a thousand times worse as my metabolism kicked in pretty much as soon as we hit the road again.

Eventually, at half-four - eight and a bit hours after we were meant to have reached our little bastion of rest - we arrived at a random bus lot in the middle of nowhere. Everyone got off and we piled into a tuktuk that took us to a hostel. After a bit of half-hearted bartering we bedded down and as soon as our heads hit the pillow we were out.

Well, I was out. 

Hel had about an hour’s sleep, and then spent the next three hours riving in pain on the toilet. The noodle soup that she had been singing the praises of had obviously not enjoyed its time in her intestines. And this was just the start of another chronological path constructed mainly of shit.