The Smile Bar.

We ended up spending all of yesterday down on the island, here in Vang Vieng. Just across the rickety bamboo bridge is a few small bars, with little raised huts along the edge of the river. We'd been down there the day before, so we headed back down there yesterday to get some pictures of the views.

An afternoon stretched into the evening, which soon became a late night. As the only people there for most of the time we sat and chatted with the owner, drinking Beer Lao. I'm not sure what time we left, I know it was somewhere in the early hours.

We made it across the bridge without any incidents. It wasn't until we were traversing some sizable puddles that the problems started. Sam lost a sandle in one of the large puddles. We tried to fish around for it but it couldn't be found. Somehow, I'm still not sure exactly how, I saw Sam start to fall backwards. I've seen her do this before, it's something she is quite adept at when drunk. She just went over, flat on her back into this huge muddy puddle. SPLASH!!!

I pulled her out, and having given up on the sandle, she staggered on with just one. Sonn the one became none, as she discarded that too, deciding that one sandle was of no use, and made walking back to the guesthouse a pain anyway.

Back at the guesthouse I managed to get some pictures of the drowned rat, before she stripped off her sodden clothes, dumping them on the bathroom floor. So when she got a shower, so did her clothes. Seemed like a sensible thing to do at the time, she says.

Anyway, luckily we hadn't booked an activity for today, so we had time to recover. More HBO! We have however, booked an activity for tomorrow, my birthday. We are going kyaking and caving, so should be fun. It looked lots of fun, when we were watching them all come passed us yesterday while sat at the Smile Bar.