We decided to take a local bus from Vientiane to Vang Vieng (about 4 hours north), as its cheaper than the tourist bus, and actually was less full in this case and overtook the VIP bus which had broken down! Max had taken the bus the day before us, and so had reserved us a bungalow by the river. This would all have been good, except his directions were awful and he wrote 'override guesthouse' in his text instead of 'otherside', so we searched for ages and when we...

Just wrote out a huge essay for you and the computer deleted it... so this will probably be less detailed!! Our last few days in Cambodia were a bit of a nightmare... returning to Phnom Penh from Ratanakiri included a very early start, and initially the bus was making good time, until it had a puncture and being Cambodia the spare tyre was also unusable! After hours of mechanics trying at Cambodian pace to fix the problem, using the same bald tyres and just repl...