Hi all! Hope all is well with everyone. I think this will be a rather quick entry (horray! I left Colin to do the lengthy one..) as we arrived here yesterday and are leaving in about an hour.. We weren't going to bother coming to Vientiane (the capital of Laos) because it sounded a bit boring and ugly, however it was on our route south and we needed somewhere to sleep so we thought we might as well stop here, and I'm so glad we did! It's really lovely and quite different to everywhere else we've been. However, the journey down here was not as much fun... We hopped on the bus from Luang Prabang at 8am (we had to get up at 6am, after a pub crawl (of 2 pubs) the night before. b******s.) and I was asleep by about 8.05am.. However when I woke up at about 10am I was more than surprised to see Colin AWAKE. Yes folks, he was awake. And he was looking a little frazzled, however I was too tired to care and rolled over for a few more hours sleep. About lunch time I woke up again and he was still looking a bit edgy so I mustered up the energy to ask what was wrong. He CLAIMED that a Lao guy in front of us was hiding an AK-47 machine gun rifle thing in his denim jacket. Colin tends to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist at the best of times so as always I told him to shut up and went for another sleep. However about an hour later we stopped for lunch and the guy stood up, flung his machine gun over his shoulder and went for lunch with his family.. All the westerners on the bus just looked at each other for a minute, went a bit pale and decided it was probably best not to ask. While having our delightful lunch of water buffalo soup, I happened to glance down at the seat beside me and there was another bloody gun with no owner, just sitting quite happily BESIDE ME! We thought there must be some explanation and so headed for the 'Dangers and Annoyances' section of the Lonely Planet for help which told us that since the revolution in 1975, 'Route 13, between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, has been plagued by shootings'. s***. We also learned as we pulled into the bus terminal in Vientiane that 'it was bombed in a terrorist attack in 2003 and tourists are advised to keep up to date with the political situation at all times'. Double s***. However, none of this was quite as scary as the Route 13 itself, the highest, windiest road I've ever seen. It makes the 'rest and be thankful' look like Snuff Mill, not for the faint hearted. I found that closing your eyes helps. We also ran over a dog and a wee baby's toy because the driver didn't seem to know where the brakes were. I would say that was metaphor for us barging through villages and trampling on their lives, but I'd be wrong because we were literally DRIVING over their culture, which isn't as bad. By the time we got here we were a bit rattled and went straight to bed (after another Indian ). Anyway, despite this being the real capital of a real socialist country with some of the most spectacular and important temples in South East Asia, we spent the morning sleeping and eating bagels in a coffee shop, and the afternoon wandering about a market, getting bored and going to a bowling alley! It was fun to be bowling under a hammer and sickle - I've never been so pleased to go bowling in all my life. Who needs culture when you have chips, pool and bowling? It was excellent. I won the first game of bowling and pool! Colin's rubbish. My bowling success was particularly amazing. I really did have the moves of a pro. Anyway, we don't have any decent pictures of Vientiane at all because we bowled the whole time. However we have some excellent photos of the bowling alley.. just wait.. you'll be amazed. Colin keeps forgetting to bring the lead for the camera so we have about 4000 pictures still to upload. We'll get round to it eventually. Bus time! We probably won't be able to do another one of these until we get to Cambodia in about a week or two because the areas we're going into are quite remote. Bet you can't wait. Be good, Lots of love, Jenny xxxxxxxxx