It's hard to describe what it's like over here. There are so many similarities between these three countries (Thailand, Cambodia and Laos (but it's pronounced Lao)) that I've been traveling through and yet, they are all very different. Thailand is the richer of the three countries. Cambodia is the poorest, and Lao falls somewhere in the middle.

Upon my arrival in Thailand I think I was in more shock than anything with the way the world works on this side of the planet. The smells were different, the language was strange, and the heat and humidity were causing me to sweat like I had just run another race. They were driving on the other side of the road and it was killing me how they try to scam all the travelers out of money.

We then crossed the border from Thailand into Cambodia and that's where the real culture shock hit me. Although we were back to driving on our side (the way we drive in the States) I couldn't stand to see kids begging for food because their parents couldn't provide for them. Or seeing them (Kids around the age of 14) sell themselves to sleazy white tourists that come through. No one at any age should have to be begging for food, and the kids shouldn't be the main source of income for any family.

I left Cambodia on a bad note. After Siem Riep we went back to the capital of Cambodia for one more night before catching a 9 hour bus ride in attempt to make our way across the border to Laos. Knowing that we were in for a long ride Avy and I decided to head out and find a store to buy snacks. But walking alone at night isn't always the smartest thing to do. We ended up getting mugged along the way.

We were crossing a street and some guy came up from behind Avy and grabbed her purse. She resisted and as he speed away we both started chasing him and screaming like a mad men. We saw him throw down the strap to her purse and speed off into the night and we started walking frantically back to the main road that we were walking down. The people that we had just passed came running to see if we were ok and the picked up Avy's broken purse with all its contents still in it. We were lucky enough to have not gotten hur and not have lost anythingt, but we were all ready to get out of the big city.

LAOS

We crossed the border about 4 days ago and set ourselves into Lao time (things happen here when they want to happen and there is no saying when or how we will get to our destination). We made our way to the Mekong River were there are about 4,000 islands. We took a boat (a little piece of wood basically) to an island called Don Det.

This little island was a self sufficient island growing most everything they needed to survive. Having cows, chicken and sheep roam the island and letting the tourists that come through be the main source of income for the islands on this part of the river.

Lao has so far been amazing. The language is similar to Thai and we figure that since we are hear the longest we might try to become a bit more fluent than we were in the other countries (we have basically only been learning hello and thank you, but know we know our numbers and good bye - we are on our way to being 100% fluent!).

We left Don Det and decided to take a "Local Bus" (Local meaning anything and everything shoved into the back of a truck with benches - I think that at one point we had 31 people crammed into the truck, live chickens, fish both dead and alive, bags fulls of crickets and who knows what else along with all our luggage and what ever else the Loations (What Lao people are called) had with them.)

We arrived in Pakse and took the next local bus in hopes to find coffee plantations, green tea plantations and some amazing waterfalls that were suppose to be hidden somewhere around this area. We found some waterfalls but they were off in the distance and everything else we tried led us to a dead end. We took the local bus once again to the next town found a room for the night and realized that we were in the middle of nowhere where ATM's aren't on the corner of every street and we had about no money in their local currency.

We begged with some guys to exchange with us allowing us to have enough to get back Pakse where we could then find a bank (Pakse was a big town in comparison to the place we ended up staying at). The next day we found a driver that took us all over the place showing us the green tea plantation, coffee plantations (where we were able to sample both coffee and tea) and took us to these water falls that were probably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen (words cannot describe the scenery here). That night we took a night bus (yes a bus with beds - and no not a good way to get some sleep) on our way to the capital of Lao, Vientiane.