Ruairí and Alfred: Nature Break

Balcony of our lodge

Every now and again it is nice to get out of the city. Our last trip was to Vang Vieng (Alfred: about which you still have to write!) but any other town/city is too far to reach other than by plane or a very, very long bus trip. So while scouring the web, I came across a mention of the Rivertime Ecolodge, only 30km or so from the city centre and reachable by public transport, so we thought 'Why not?' As it happened, our friend Michael Headen also came along with us and we availed of his car to get there and back (Alfred: Well, there anyway. You'll see....).

Massive bamboo stand beside our lodge

And we had a really nice time. As you can see from the pictures (and I will let them speak for themselves as much as possible) the lodge is set on the riverbank and in quite dense forest, plants and flowers and butterflies everywhere. It is fairly basic accommodation but perfectly fine and there is a restaurant, swimming pool (OK, they chopped a big square hole on the floating restaurant and added ladders so you can easily climb in and out), nature walks, a boat for hire, bicycles, kayak etc. A ferry brings you across the river to a lovely little village where we walked through the rice fields, admired some extraordinary breeds of hens and enjoyed being somewhere that is quite clearly not used to many tourists! There is also an excellent Thai restaurant next door which served the most fabulous grilled fish for lunch on the second day!

We came back in a taxi due to the catastrophic failure of the clutch cable in Michael's car but the Thai restaurant owner does a taxi service and brought us home! We will be going again!