Vientiane would be our final destination whilst traveling through Laos. It is the capital city and therefore is quite a big place compared to some of the smaller towns and villages that we've passed through and stopped at along the way. We spent just a single night here at the New Paris Hotel. Again the city had that colonial feel to it with a heavily accented French influence.

The weather was pretty hot reaching mid thirties to forty degrees. After check in we went, as a group, for our usual orientation walk to make sure we knew the lay of the land. Famished with hunger we opted for a lunch break at the Scandinavian Bakery and then chased Brett down the many twisting roads along the riverside and took the occasional picture of the Palace and the Arc de Triumph type arch at the roads edge.

Due to not feeling so well (personally) and the soaring heat, the group quickly retreated back to the hotel and sat for a good twenty minutes taking full advantage of the air conditioning. We then retreated to our room to shower, undress and kick the air con in the room to life and just have some downtime from the heat and some quiet time to appease my cold. Not feeling to good that night we opted out of the group meeting for some R&R. Instead we crossed the road to the small convenience store and bought some cornflakes and milk and had a light supper before bed.

The next day we had breakfast, packed and met with our driver to take us to the border where we would stamp out of Laos. We then boarded a local bus across the Friendship Bridge and travelled into Thailand where we again went through border control. Once in Thailand Brett stood with a smile as we watched our bags stacked precariously on top of a tuk tuk before we piled onto it too. Complete with us squashed in, bags on the back step and on the roof, amazingly it still managed to move and pretty swiftly too! There was 10 people of us including a couple of Thai passengers and Brett clinging on at the back getting all the flaking paint and loose debris flying into his hair and eyes and mouth as we sped along (made us smile, we would have budged up!).

At the station we had time to kill so sat at the other side of the road in a little ramshackle cafe and took in a few cold drinks before our train arrived. Once boarded we found it was very different from the sleepers we'd taken in China. It had a pretty ordinary layout - like a normal train actually more comfortable. We sat and ordered some tea and drinks and relaxed before quiz-time. Brett, our quizmaster, hosted his homemade quiz to us to help pass some time. We played as 3 teams: Team Blighty was Kelly and myself and the other girls each had a team, (Canada and Norway). He gave us questions on China, Laos, some general knowledge and science. We trudged through giving some good attempts at each and for some un-be-known reason managed to win which I think surprised everyone especially us. It was good fun and a result.

Following the quiz a guard started down the carriage changing it transformer-like pulling on buckles and pulling down bunks from the sides it soon transformed fully into a sleeper carriage with the chairs facing each other folding out into a bed and a drop down bunk above each providing the second level. This felt a lot more spacious and cosy and even had privacy curtains for each bed, something of a luxury after the open plan feel to the China setup. So to bed we went with the morning delivering us to Bangkok!
Mike and Kelly