The morning after the night before and I remembered dancing around in the bucket bar and almost having a pancake on the way home. Yup, we were feeling a bit rubbish and as a result, decided to take the afternoon bus down to Vientiane and spend a few precious hours in bed for some much needed sleep.
Once the headache subsided, Leon and I got our stuff together and headed down to the ticket office where the bus took us to ANOTHER travel agency and made us wait for an hour for the bus down to Vientiane. As always, you never know what you are going to get with the so-called VIP buses, so when our decent looking bus arrived, we both let out huge sighs of relief and got onboard. Not so fast.
Even though we were the first people on the bus, we also managed to secure possibly the worst seats - well I did, as Leon's was actually functioning properly. It seemed that the 'seat' part of my chair was broken, so everytime we went over a bump I would basically fall off my seat and practically skim the floor! Much to Leon's amusement, and to those around us, this happened pretty much the whole way down to Vientiane, which was about a 5 hour journey! On the way we also stopped off at a restaurant which charged us about 4,000 riel to use the bathroom, which Leon was rather angry about (and subsequently has requested that I put this into the blog).
By the time we got to Vientiane it was approaching early evening, so we knew that we had to find a room quickly to beat the crowds that were undoubtedly drafting in on other buses from south Laos and the like. And so we walked. We must have walked into about 10 different guesthouses that were all full, and quickly our spirits were lowering as we realised the downfall of taking an afternoon bus. given that I'm not as strong or as big as Leon, I was feeling the pain of carrying my backpack around and so I took a seat in a cafe while Leon kindly went around Vientiane in search of a decent place to stay. Now Vientiane isn't a large city, in fact it's rather small, but when you are very tired from a long bus journey, a simple task takes a lot longer than usual. Thankfully after about another hour(!) or so, Leon found a room to stay in which was a little over budget but had aircon (yay!) and there weren't any obvious creepy crawlies in sight. After a pretty horrendous few hours, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner in a Japanese restaurant with sushi, california rolls and miso soup etc and it was divine! It was by far the nicest meal we had in the last 4 days and needless to say, we were both very stuffed and extremely content after dinner. With full bellies and big smiles, we retired to bed for yet another early night in front of the tele, since having a TV was of course another luxury that we usually couldn't afford!
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