So this is where the North Vietnamese really start to annoy me ( I think Hanoi was named by tourists as the people here 'Hanoi' the hell out of you…) As we step on our 24 hour bus - yes a whole night and day on the same bus - half way down we find a row of seats with tons of legroom. "Too good to be true!" one voice is telling me, "Sod it, there's legroom, sit here!" says the other voice, so we did. More westerners get on and are all directed to the back of the bus until it is full, even though the front is empty. If any of us tried to move forward, one of the drivers (or 'evils' as I called them) literally pushed us back to the back of the bus. When the bus set off, we couldn't quite believe we had got away with the amazing legroom (even though Carrie was sat next to the smallest Chinese woman who took up the room of someone at least 3 times her size), but that was pretty short lived, as 20 minutes after we'd set off we stop and box after box, massive bag after massive bag come on board. Of course, the 1st place they went was in front of our seats, which actually left us with no legroom whatsoever and once all that was taken up, they started to fill up the aisles. My cabin crew training came back to haunt me "nothing in the aisles or exits in case of emergency" - we were literally being wedged in to the back of the bus! After a lot more stops where more boxes came, I rebelled and climbed over the boxes to one of the seats a bit further forward where the drivers' mates had 2 seats to themselves and no boxes in their foot wells. I was actually lifted by the scruff of my neck and put back in my original seat! Anyway, after a lot of hours and not a lot of distance covered due to all the stopping, we arrived at the border with Laos but the border was closed, so they turned off the engine and we all had to wrap up warm and try and get some sleep for the next 6 hours until we could cross the border. There were a load of nice lads on our bus and we'd bonded pretty well by this point by our utter disbelief of the way we were being treated, so we felt nice and safe.

In the morning we went through the most unorganised border crossing ever. The guy couldn't 'speak' a word of English, but he was quite capable of writing the following message on a post it note which he stuck up in the window after half the bus had already gone through and the rest of us had to adhere to: "Laos National Day, Dec 2nd. Pay and extra 1$ for overtime" - brilliant, I love the way their rules work over here. Anyway, me and Carrie finally got through and went and sat back on our favorite bus for about an hour and waited for the rest of the bus to come through, when we suddenly realised that we hadn't actually been stamped into the country after all! With the dreaded thought of having to go back to North Vietnam, we sprinted back to the crossing for yet another little disagreement with an immigration officer who wanted us to pay again for their uselessness.

After all the drama when we finally reach Vientienne at about 6pm (after a horrible 24 hours that I never want to experience again if I can help it) we have big plans to hit the town, meet the guys from the bus, stroll along the river, play the local game of Pampou (where you throw darts at balloons) which we discovered on the hotel hunt. But unfortunately, when we got to the hotel my head hit the pillow and when I opened my eyes it was morning..

Next day, before getting on the bus to go to Vang Vieng, I wanted to at least see some of Vientienne. After visiting the cash point to get out some Kip 700,000 of it, all in 10,000 notes, we felt very rich, our wallets wouldn't even shut! I went and sat by the river to do a bit of forward planning with my Lonely Planet when the waiter started chatting to me. He explained all about the last Indochina war and that just over the river (the Mekong again) was Thailand. When we finished chatting, he thanked me for talking to him... I nearly fell off my chair! Already a better impression of the Laos people than the whole of the North Vietnamese in one conversation- good things must be in store…