We took the sleeper bus from Don Det to Vientiane as we couldn't find anything that we wanted to do in between, so had to resign ourselves to the 20 hour bus ride. After the boat took us back to the mainland we arrived at the same restaurant we had waited for 2 hours at on the way to Don Khong (fortunately we only waited for 15 minutes this time) and got on the most spacious seating bus I have ever been on! It wasn't the sleeper we had ordered but was so comfy that neither of us complained. Three bumpy hours later we arrived in Pakse to find that we were changing to the sleeper bus, IN 6 HOURS!! 6 hours and an argument later (over who knows what) we got on the bus to Vientiane and had the whole back bed (the size of 2 doubles) to ourselves. If a cockroach hadn't fallen through the air conditioning on to Sarah (which I thought I'd removed until she pointed out that I had laid on it and crushed it) and the road which made you leave the bed every 5 minutes we might have slept.

We arrived in Vientiane at 6 in the morning and had to get another bus (a truck with a bench welded into it) to the centre of the city. After the cheap rooms on the islands it was hard work finding a room that was in our price range, and the only one that we did was next to the drain for all the toilets in the hotel so you can imagine the smell.

After finding our room we decided to take a walk around and found great delight on finding an English pub called Hare and Hound (like Sarah's family local!), although they didn't serve English drinks so the delight was short lived on my half.

Neither of us really fancied staying in Vientiane but we had to get a visa for Thialand. With our great planning we had to stay for an extra day as we arrived on a Sunday and the Thai embassy was closed. On Monday we got an expensive tuk tuk out there to find that it was a Thai national holiday so was closed again. This was just the start of a series of nightmares involving this visa! The next day we were up bright and early to (hopefully) get a visa on the same day so that we could leave expensive Vientiane behind. Little did we know that around 600 people had the same idea, so when we arrived at 8:20 (10 minutes before it opened) we were nuimbers 194 and 195 in the queue. We eventually handed in our application and left the embassy at 11:30. It is fair to say that it was a long morning!!! and we still had to go back the next day to collect our passports. We arrived half an hour before the gates opened (after trying to explainto our tuk tuk driver that we didn't want to go straight to the Thai border, which was deasier said than done) and were number 104 and 105 in the queue to collect our passports. All in all we spent 5 hours in the Thai embassy over two days just so that we can stay in Thailand for more than 15 days! The only good thing about it was that it was free.

The night between dropping off our passports and collecting them we got a few drinks and sat in the communal area of our hotel and started chatting to few of the other guests staying there. The first girl we spoke to was from Moscow and it turned out that she worked at the hostel we stayed at when we were in Moscow (Godzilla's). It was even creppier when we found out that we were at her leaving party!

We also spoke to a guy from Dundee who lives in Bangkok but was doing a motorbike tour along the Ho Chi Minh Trail to raise awareness for his compaign to abolish the use of cluster bombs. He was in Vientiane (not on the Ho Chi Minh trail) for a large exhibition on bomb awareness day to promote his idea, which was called project pineapple (as the individual bombs in a cluster bomb resemble pineapples). Laos was particularily badly bombed (most bombed country in the world) during the Vietnam war as they helped the Vietnamese and the Ho Chi Minh trail went through western Laos. This added to the order that the American bombers were not to return from mission into Northern Vietnam with any bombs, so they just dropped any left over on Laos. It was a very worthy cause that the guy was promoting and set up but the only issue we had was that he didn't seem to want to put in the effort to make iot known to the people that could make a difference. He wanted other people to do that.

Other than that neither of us particularily liked Vientiane as it was very expensive (compared to the rest of Laos) and there isn't very much to do. Although they do have there very own version of the Arch de Triomphe.