We said goodbye to five members of our group in Hanoi and met our crazy new trip leader, Kate, and seven new travellers. En route to Laos we stopped over in Vinh, which is the birthplace of Ho Chi Minh. There was nothing happening there (or not in our part of town at least) so we just had a few beers by the pool in the hotel and an early night before the next day's long journey across the Vietnam/Laos border and on to Vientiane. It was the most straightforward border-crossing yet, there was not another tourist in sight.

The landscape in Laos is beautiful the roads snake up and down through the mountains which are covered in dense greenery - trees, banana plants, bamboo and, at the lower levels, rice fields. The weather was cloudy, rainy and much cooler than Vietnam. We passed lots of small villages, most of the houses were made of wood with either a thatched roof or a corrugated iron roof; some of the newer houses had a brick bottom-half and wooden top-half and a few were modern-style brick houses with tiled roofs. I rarely saw cars in these villages, which made me wonder whether the people ever visit the city or just stay up in the mountains.

Along the road to Vientiane we passed several trucks piled high with shelves full of dogs, coming from Thailand and heading to the Vietnamese meat market (one of the local delicacies that I didn't sample when I was there!). We had a hilarious local guide, Mr Touy, who sang Westlife's 'My Love' to us on the bus. He had previously been a monk for ten years and during that time learned English from speaking to foreign tourists.

Vientiane is the capital of Laos and has a population of only half a million people. There are no high rise buildings and the place has a surprisingly 'small town' feel to it for a capital city. We walked around, taking in the Presidential Palace and the 'Champs Elysees of Laos' - the main road which runs from the palace to the Victory Monument. The Victory Monument, which commemorates Lao people that died in pre-revolutionary wars, was built in the 1960s from concrete that had been donated by the USA for the construction of an airport! The interior roof of the monument is decorated with traditional images in gold and shiny mosaic tiles. I climbed the seven floors to the top of the monument, from which there was a great view over the whole city.

We went to the pretty Si Saket Temple, which houses thousands of Buddha statues. We also visited the impressive That Luang Temple, a huge gold-painted structure. There we spent a long time chatting to a novice monk named Somchith. He was 18 years old, originally from a village in Northern Laos and had been a novice monk in Vientiane for four years. He dreamed of becoming an English teacher one day so he was very excited to meet people that he could practice his English with. I subsequently exchanged some emails with him.

We had a great lunch at the Joma bakery and managed to fit in a massage before catching the sunset and having a drink in one of the riverside bars, from which I could see Thailand on the opposite bank of the river.

We stumbled on a pub that had a pool table, table football and several TVs showing different channels. There was a DJ playing a strange mix of songs, including The Irish Rover and A Pair of Brown Eyes! Throughout Laos there is a midnight curfew; it is not strictly enforced but the vast majority of pubs close at 11:30pm. We asked a tuk tuk driver to take us somewhere that was open late but we ended up at a dodgy bar on the outskirts of town so we didn't hang around there long and just grabbed some beers to take back to the hotel.

Laos was such a pleasant change from Vietnam - no horns blaring, nobody hassling me to buy things that I didn't want and no-one trying to rip me off. Everything moves at a relatively slow pace and it's so relaxed.