Our bus journey from Laos to Vietnam was another 22hr delight! The only buses that will take you to Vietnam are local buses so the seats went back slightly but it was far from comfortable. At some point in the night a man came and lied in the gap beween Michaels chair and the next seat, we thought we had done well and had 2 seats each at this bit where there wa quite a big gap between you and the next seat until michael had an unwelcome visitor. Absolutely no sense of personal space had his feet all over hime, hands arms etc. Michael had to move next to me.
We got to the border at about 5am and it didnt open until 7am which wa annoying. We stopped at this restaurant and a guy got on the bus telling us we had to pay $3 for a stamp in our passport or we couldnt go to Vietnam. This was of course absolute rubbish, it was a restaurant, he had no ID and was charging us more than the Laos and Vietnamese people. He wanted to take our passports away with him somewhere too! Forget it! He tried shouting at us but we just stood our ground. Got to border crossing and got our stamp for free etc. Bit of a hassle border, goodness knows how many times we had to show passport and Visa.
We got back on the bus and were expecting another 8 hours on there to take us to the 22 hours we were told it would take. Annoyingly at 8 am they put a video on in the bus at a volume level i did not think was possible, had to shout to sapeak and it actually hurt your ears! after about 1 hour of sleep the night before this was obviously extremely aggrivating! however at around 11am we are told we will be in Hue in 5 minutes. Very confusing, especially as they rush us off the bus, the fastest we'd seen anyone move from Laos! I was worried we were in some place that wasnt Hue, but it was!

Hue was absolutely lovely, we got ourselves a nice place, about 3 quid each and we had our own computer with internet. We spent our day in Hue renting bicycles and exploring the place, we saw some buddhist Pagodas (monastries) - one of them was where the monk who set himself alight in the 70's was from, his blue car was there - really interesting. There was also young boys training to be monks and we watched them do some meditation.....well I did, Michael was too busy trying to get pictures of these massive honey bees ( they were actually huge, see photo). After there we rode along the river, experienced rush hour traffic (bit scary) and explored the back streets. really lovely day.

The next day we got a bus to Hoi An to get some beach time!