The Project

From 24th to 29th July we've had a great opportunity to help out a village near Luang Prabang.
We split up into 3 groups and stayed with the locals.
On the first day, we met the kids which was absolutely amazing! :) they were so enthusiastic and cheeky, even through the language barrier we had a great time interacting with them :)
The real work started on the second day. As we were doing the foundations of the school building, some of us had to carry buckets of mud from the hole in the ground to the actual building which was harder than it sounds! Others did pouring\stamping mud which was also a lot more challenging than it sounds. Throughout the week, whenever we couldn't play with the children, they were more than happy to help us out and they were pretty strong kids making us look weak! Yet, they kept our spirits high which gave us motivation to finish what we started.
Some of us had a trip to the rice fields which was interesting as it gave good insight into the locals working life.
On the Friday 27th another World Challenge group joined us. They were all boys group from London and because of some of their negative attitude towards the whole expedition, it made us realize how lucky we were to have each other and how amazing our team is.
We had a really nice translator who made it easier for us to communicate with the locals.
On our last evening, the community held a ceremony for us to say good luck for the future and thank you for the help.

PreLim Project

We are very much looking forward to the project where we will be doing a lot of manual  labour in very hot conditions (around 33 degrees the other day!). I think that it will be very challenging but also humbling to see how the people really live outside of the big city (as we are staying with local people) and have only had contact with locals on our short trek. But we have enjoyed them so far!

We will update you next time we are at a computer which could be some time i.e. when we are back in Vientiane on the 31st but may be after that even.

Very difficult to find postcards and post boxes/offices (we haven't seen any) so don't expect any soon but we are all getting on okay with good team morale and even the guides on our first trek said we were 'the happiest group they had ever had' so hope to continue with that ;) 

Vang Vieng (U4)

So we are now in Vang Vieng having taken a four hour bus journey from Vientiane (one bus with a plasma TV but the other with minimal aircon hehe). Beautiful views from the hotel room in Vang Vieng of the surrounding mountains which we all agree look like the Avatar mountains but do not look nearly as good on camera.

We went to some caves today which were fun but we got very muddy walking through bogs and mud. Some managed to go down into them but others didn't get that far/gave up (lazy!)...but we got some other stunning photos of the river that runs through this town and the surrounding Paddy Fields,, like classic Vietnam photos that you see in tour guides!

Off to Luang Prabang tomorrow morning.

Trek (U3)

First impressions of Laos: not as poor as expected, more electricity, humidity, great food at a cheap price everywhere!

Trek Phase (three days in da jungle) jungle jungle jungle is massive!

We really enjoyed these three days due to the great guides that acted as friends and helpers. They cooked amazing food for us over the few days whilst keeping a smile on their faces.

Slept in hammocks and bashas for the first night but torrential rain got us all wet and forced us into tents it was so bad! But second night we slept in an elephant tower which was pretty awesome after swimming in a beautiful river.

The main leader (Ola) was fantastic and hearing his story was inspirational to all of us!

Update 2

We got to Vientiane and we managed to get some great accommodation nahhhht but it was good fun and a good experience. We found the humidity pretty crazy but managed to acclimatise quickly (three days). We then prep. for the small trek by packing our bags in the evening but then having to unpack it all again the next day because they wanted us to take big bags and not day sacks :L

any questions so far? but i wont be able to answer them because we wont have internet....

Update 1

Landed safely in Bangkok with a six hour transfer time woopwoop!!! hehe. It was great fun with a bit of team building exercise which we were great at. The flight was long but we all enjoyed barely any sleep and the huge volume of films to get through...

Charlie

We had a 3 and a half hour meeting today and had the chance to meet our expedition leader, Charlie! :)

He had to fly in from Scotland to say hi to us, the teachers and the parents. He talked to us individually about what we wanted to achieve from this trip and just any problems to do with the trip that we had :) He also talked to us about his past experiences which is I guess to assure us that we will be fine. I know this trip will be life-changing and I just can’t wait!

Starting Off

So basically this blog is all about parents getting involved, contacting each other and just keeping each other motivated and keeping everyone and anyone informed....at the top of the blog are a number of pages about different sections of the expedition and trying to inform about what we are doing before and on expedition. Hope you enjoy the posts by our team and please leave comments!!!