We arrived in Vientiane last saturday and my first impression was that i was not going to like the the Capital of Lao. It was a big City and I have found recently that i have more enjoyed the small towns and villages much more then the big Cities. We found relatively cheap accomo after searching for about an hour, although when we stayed there we realised why it was so cheap. Having a shower with half the spider population in Lao was not a good experience.

There wasn't much to do in the capital but one thing there was to do was visit Buddha Park, which is a park on the outskirts of the capital. The park is famous for its massive sculptures of Buddist and Hindu Gods including, Vishnu and Shiva and looked really cool.

The whole Lao experience has been really cool, it is an amazing country with honest, polite and friendly people, however we had whizzed through the country pretty quickly and we suddenly where in a position that we had days we had not accounted for. Matt our friend from the slow boat had to go down to Phuket to see his other mates, while Thomas the Italian was off to Saigon. So Nim, Rik, Dan and I decided on two different options.

1..Spend the free 6 days in Hanoi and Halong Bay in Vietnam
2..Spend the free 6 days in Sien Riep and Angkor in Cambodia

It made more sense for us to go down to Cambodia seeing as we were to meet the guys in Bangkok for Xmas. So our second decision was to either...

1..Go by plane, which would take 1hour and US$140
2..Go by bus, which would take a bit more time (not sure how long) but would only cost in total around $30 each

We caught our first coach on from Vientiane at 7 in the evening bound for Pakse and arriving at 7 in the morning on Monday, it was a cool journey as i got a bit of sleep. As soon as we got there we got the connecting mini bus which had 10 crammed people and luggage inside. As the journey continued we kept making more stops with more mini bus changes and each time we changed the state of the mini buses deterioted drastically.

My first impression of Cambodia was that it was a much more poorer nation then Lao with much more poverty. When we were driving through the villages it really reminded me of Mogadishu with colourful and busy markets, with people on bikes and mopeds crowding the street, in searing heat and dusty roads. We got to our night pit stop location at 8 in the evening on Monday a full 25 hours after we left Vientiane and we were still 8 hours away from Siem Reap.

The pit stop town was called Chaing Khong and the nights accomo was probably the worst i have ever seen, the mattress was full of bugs, there was no hot water, the walls were decaying and spiders were dropping from the ceiling. I pulled out my cotton linen from my bag, wrapped it around myself and tryed to go to sleep.

The next morning our journey continued where we took a local bus to Siem Reap, which took another 7 hours, but finally we had got to our destination. We had left on Sunday 7pm and arrived on Tuesday 3pm. Should have taken the god-damn plane!