A very early start today as we caught the 7am 'bus' to Nam Khan at the border. I say bus but it was a pick-up with roof and seats. About 2hrs into the 3hr journey a local woman was sick over the some of the seats which was nice. The border crossing itself was easy, and the Vietnam border was very organised. Thats when it stopped being easy! We realised that the bus to hanoi was 9hrs (6hrs, then another 3 hrs after a short stop), when we thought it would be 4hrs, ...

Most people head straight to the border, and don't spend the day at Sam Neua, but because we are stupid, we had completely ran out of money and the bank opened at 8am, and the bus we had to catch left at 7am! But we were really glad we stayed as it was not only a welcome break from bus journeys, but also a really good experience! Sam Neua is a rual village in the mountains (so its cold) and the people aren't used to tourists (like they are in the other places we ...

We caught the 8am bus to Sam Neua which took about 10hrs!! The bus was a small bus (about 16 seats) but was crammed full of people (about 24), and for literally the whole journey there was one woman being sick (asian people seem to suffer with trave sickness really badly!). When we finally arrived at Sam Neua we had dinner with some of the people on our bus.

Today we started the long trek to the Laos-Vietnam border. We got the 9:30am bus to Phonsavan where we arrived at about 7:30pm. Two of the men on the bus had guns, one a rifle and one a hand gun... this made us feel a bit uneasy but they were ok! We stayed overnight in Phonsavan.

We visited the Patouxay monument today (in picture) and the Laos Museum.