We arrived in Vientiane to rain. It was grey and miserable and pretty cold too. We only spent one night/2days in Vientiane and that was enough! The first day we arrived we took a walk around to see what there was. Not that much apparently. The fact it did not stop raining did not help matters. We saw the Presidentrial Palace, Wat Sisaket and the cities large arch which supposedly ressembles the Arc de Triomphe. Due to Vientiane's troubled past the arch was never quite completed. The highlight of the day was probably finding a nice scandinavian patiserie where they served delicious hot chocolate and carrot cake!

Our room for the night may be our worst room to date. It clearly was a prison cell. It had concrete walls and ceilings, no electricity and nothing but two hard beds and a sign warning us to be careful of the fleas in the beds! As expected it was not the fleas that kept me awake all night but our extremely thin walls and the very loud couple next door!

It was a dilema really, where to spend time in Vientiane - in our disgusting room or outside in the miserable cold and rain! We did come up with a great way to get out of the rain. We went in to a local massage parlour and booked ourselves in for a full body scrub. "Full" body scrub it was indeed! Yikes. Anyway it killed a few hours and my skin is now smooth as a babies bum.

We managed to kill a few more hours until it was time for our bus journey to Hanoi in Vietnam. Now this journey proved to be a journey from hell. It was to be a 20hour journey so we knew it was not going to be easy, but seriously if we had known in advance quite how horrendous it was going to be we may have not been so quick to book onto a bus.

We got on the bus and realised this was not a VIP bus as expected but a local bus. People piled on and off we went. 20 minutes later we stopped and all the people piled off. Another half hour or so later we stopped again and the same people all got back on. Whether we had been driving in circles all that time I'll never know. There were a lot of dodgy exchanges of money going on. The bus seemed to stop every 10 minutes. It was so frustrating. At one point we stopped for 5 hours! The driver got off and just left us there in the middle of the night. No oe had a clue what was going on! It was cold and uncomfortable and there was no chance of getting any sleep. There were boxes, rolled up carpets and working equipment piled all around us meaning we couldn't even recline our chairs and meant getting in or out of our chairs was quite a challenge. At 7 in the morning we arrived at the border where we needed to go through the passport point. We arrived half an hour before it opened so had to stand around in the FREEZING cold and rain for ages. We were tired and cold, it really was not the best experience. When the office eventually opened all the locals kept trying to push in front of us at the foreign person part. So annoying. We then had to cross the border and do it all again. We were made to pay $1 each or they would not give us our passports back! The whole process of standing around in the cold, pushing and shoving took over 2 hours! I was glad to get back on the stinking bus. I managed to get a few hours of sleep I think due to exhaustion. There was absolutely no peace and quiet as all the local guys behind us felt the need to screech and shout to even the people next to them. At one point they were watching porn. You would think they could at least mute it for goodness sake, ah! Torture. We eventually arrived in Hanoi 25hours later!!! Yes 25 hours! I have never been so relieved to get off a bus.