5 - 9 April

The sleeper bus was greta, it was made up actual beds for once!

We arrived in Vientiane about 7am and then caught a tuk tuk into the main town. We had to have a real look around to find somewhere to stay, the prices there were crazy. We settled on a guesthouse that was a bit scummy and our room was right next to the drain where everyone's poo went out, so it stank rotten.

We didn't really do that much in Vietiane as it was that expensive. I was also a real wreck after my emotional stay on Don Det. I was so close to giving up on myself, but I knew I couldn't live the way I was any longer.

We spent a lot of time just pottering around the streets and we even found a oub called the Hare and Hounds to replace my local in Ramsbottom for a short while.

We stayed with a few interesting characters in the guesthouse. There was one man who was doing a bike trip around South East Asia to raise awareness of cluster bombs and there was a Russian girl who by chance we had attended her leaving party in Moscow three months before and not even known! She worked in the hostel that we stayed in. How random is that?

We didn't want to spend as long as we did here, but we had the problem of needing to sort out visas for Thailand. We tried to get them sorted the first chance we had but it was a Thai holiday so we came the first thing the next morning and there was a queue of over 600 people! It took three hours to hand our passports in and then we had to collect them and queue for another six hours the following day. What a pain!

By the 9th we were so happy to be leaving. Vientiane was lovely, but it would have been a lot more fun if we had more money.