Today has been a very long day. We're knackered!! It all started when we arrived in Hue yesterday at around 5pm. After some food and a beer we set off to find a cheap hotel. What we didn't expect to find was that every hotel was rammed with Vietnamese celebrating the bank holiday weekend. 2 hours and very sore shoulders later we took a hotel up on the offer of a matress in reception with the night staff. So that was that, we got some beers and rum in the busy bars and returned at midnight and got onto our matress! At 4.30am the kitchen staff arrived and we were awake, not wide awake because we were so tired but deifinitely awake!! At 6 am today our bus was supposed to arrive to take us up the Vietnamese coast towards the border to a place I think is called Hong Ha or something. It took off at 7am! We disembarked the comfy coach 2 hours later and tried to find the bus station so we could get to Lao Bao which is on the Vietnamese side of the Viet/Lao border. We found our transportation - a mini bus designed for 8 or 9 people. It had 20 people rammed in for most of the way. The jourey took about 1.5 hours... long enough! So there we were at Lao Bao with no sign of accommodation so we decided we'd leave today and walked over the bridge into Lao and had to pay 30 quid each to get in. They have a list of prices for different countries and UK is at the very top :-( In Lao we intended to stay near the border but we had 10,000 Laos kip left after the cost of the visa and the nearest ATM was 10k away so we decided to get a bus out of there. Thankfully a company let us get on, promising to pay them when we got to Savannaket because we had no money! For our massive 10,000 kip (about 80p) we got 2 bottles of water, 5 cobs of bread and 2 bundles of rice wrapped in banana leaves, nice!! We like Laos already, they charge us tourists 50p-80p for water in Vietnam.. 6 hours later we arrived in Savannaket after picking up a guy who'd had a motorbike accident and had clearly not been wearing a hemlet. I thought we were takng him to a hospital but we dropped him in the middle of nowhere. He apparently lives in the middle of nowehere. And here we are in Savannaket!! On first appearances it's a nice little place, cheap. Our hotel is only about 7 quid air-conned. It's not too busy but we still found a little bar for beers.
I've no idea what we'll do in Laos or how long we'll stay in any place. We have one place to be and that's Bangkok to meet Sarah mid May but in the meantime, Laos is our oyster.
Goodbye for now, the Laos beer (which is also very good) is calling!
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