We ate, drank coffee, wrote our journals, and enjoyed feeling a little bit more continental, as Vientiane is very French. The weather was immense too, and even if we had a day of activities planned, we wouldn't have been able to see it through. So really, it was just recuperation until the looming bus journey from hell, to Hanoi.
Boy, were we thrown in at the deep end. As our first experience of a sleeper bus, on a full twenty six hour journey, we were already fairly nervous. When we were dropped off at the international bus station, we were ambushed by Lao people ushering us onto a bus. To put the proverbial cherry on top, we were less than happy to discover that we were the only Westerners on the bus. Every other passenger was Lao or Vietnamese, so bar one Korean man who tried to befriend us, we were very much alone.
What exactly could we do now? We had no choice but to start our steady stream of prayers to the man above, begging for an easy and safe journey. We just had to deal with it.
As it turned out, the journey was bearable. Only just. We were sat between a group of Vietnamese boys who kept staring and laughing at us every now and then, but trusting my gut instinct, I felt they meant no harm. The whole way through the mammoth journey, we were sitting in our reclined pods, trying to block out the soul destroying Lao pop videos and dodgey, dubbed Kung Fu films, and trying to get some shut eye. Surprisingly, we managed it, and stole about four or five hours of bad sleep before I realised we'd been parked outside the border crossing all night.
All the buses that had left the station at Vientiane were parked in a line behind us, waiting for the border crossing to open. What a waste of time!!! We could have had 5 hours cut off our journey if we'd left later on, but who knows why things work the way they do out here. It's all part of the game.
Passport control was an interesting experience as always. Having been through border crossings in Central America, I knew what sort of thing to expect. Annabel, however, was completely dazed by the experience. We pushed through the crowds to get our passports seen first, and were then directed up the road, by a simply shooing gesture, to find immigration. We walked up the muddy pathway in the drizzle, in our little flip flops, hoping that the weather up in North Vietnam wasn't going to be like this all the time, missing sunny Laos already. We fought through the Laos bus drivers trying to fast track the immigration process, as much to Annabel's frustration, they have no idea about the very British prospect of queuing. Not here. Not ever, Bells.
We survived the border and were eager to get back in the warm, sticky bus, just so we could get back to sleep and skim past the next ten hours. Unfortunately for us, there was more than the Kung Fu films and Lao ring tones to combat, but the almost constant blaring of the bus's three tiered horn! Seriously, every two minutes we were disrupted from our sleep from this ridiculous noise. As we have discovered, the highway code in South East Asia is pretty much "As long as you beep them, anything goes".
In the end, I'm happy to report, that we survived the bus, the music, the Kung Fu, the border, and the incessant horn, to say "GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!". A new country, a new blank slate, and a whole new pool of sharks to be thrown into. God, I love travelling...
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