We got up early this morning as we had to be at the bus ticket office for our pick up at 9.30am. We had arranged to meet Sam and Steph for breakfast at 8.00am by meeting them at their place. We knocked on their door, it took a while for them to open it. Once opened they realised what had happened, they'd slept in they were panicking. We said we'd go for breakfast and wait for them there. Only 15 minutes later they turned up all packed and ready to go, very impressed, they even had time to get some breakfast. After breakfast we walked round to the office and waited for our tuk tuk pick up to the bus station. It wasn't long before it came and it was only a short journey to the bus station. At the bus station we got on our bus which was an actual VIP bus, so far whenever we've wanted a VIP bus we've been fobbed off with something else. So in our comfy seats we sat for the journey with one comfort stop the journey was fine. We got into Vientiane at around 1.15pm, well we got into the bus station which was just outside of Vientiane so we had to take a tuk tuk to get to the centre. Once in the centre we had no clue about where we were going to stay so we went to a coffee shop over the road from where we got dropped off. It had wifi, air con and amazing ice cream drinks! We were all on wifi trying to find somewhere to stay, eventually we found somewhere from Sam and Steph's guide book and went to look for it. It wasn't a long walk but when we got there we were told the place had closed, back to square one. We went in one place to look at their prices but they had non of the cheaper rooms left. We decided the easiest way to do this was to go in a few asking but without bags on so James and Steph went off in search while Sam and I stayed with all the bags. They'd been gone a little while when they came back with good news. They'd found a hotel for a good price, air con and breakfast included. This was the same price as a nearby hostel with a fan room and no breakfast, no contest we went straight to check in! After we'd put our things in the room we went out for a walk and a check out of the place everything we've read says there's not that much to do in Vientiane so after much deliberation we decided to try and get the train out of Laos tomorrow and cut Vientiane short.
We enquired about trains in several shops, all of them really discouraging the train and wanting us to do a 35 hour bus journey, no thanks! In the end the best option seemed to be get the train to Bangkok stay a night there this also means we would be here for Steph's birthday and get the train the following afternoon into Cambodia. It was difficult to work out but we got there and the hotel we were staying at had the cheapest tickets so we'll book them in the morning. Tried to get an early night seen as we were somewhere comfortable and tomorrow night will be a sleeper train.