When we arrived from Vang Vieng, it was late, so we got a room at Vayakorn Guesthouse and went out for some pizza. The pizza turned out to be amazing although a bit more expensive then we had been paying for food.
We decided to stay for one day to see the few sites there are to see. Most of the sites of Vientiane are museums and we didn't go to any of those. But we did stroll around town and saw the Patouxai Arc which was modeled after the Arc de Triomphe. To commemorate casualties of war from their battle for independence from France in the 50's. So why did they model their victory monument after the people they won independence from? That's a good question and I don't have the answer for you!
We then walked along the Mekong River border between Laos and Thailand. The river was quite low and not as pretty as we had seen it before.
By this point we were ready to skidadle, so we booked a bus to Hue, Vietnam scheduled to leave the next morning at 6:30am. They told us there was only one bus going and that it was a sleeper bus. This costs twice as much, but it's known to take 24 hours as times, so we took it. In the morning we are picked up as usual and taken to the bus station where we drive past all the pretty tourist sleeper buses to this dumpy old local bus. What are we doing here we ask? Oh there is no sleeper bus, this is it! And it leaves at 8am and arrives at 4pm today! Hum... Ok well we want our money back! Blah blah blah we get some of our money back and then we wait until 8am. At 8am there are still no other passengers and the people running the bus don't look to be leaving anytime soon, so we ask the lady, who knows 3 words in English, what time we are leaving. She says 4pm... We say no we ARRIVE at 4pm... Nope! We got all mad and since we had plenty of time on our hands we went back to town to get ALL of our money back. To make a long story somewhat shorter, we ended up on the same bus, but we bought our tickets directly from the bus station for much cheaper. Lesson learned!
The bus ride itself was another adventure altogether. Luckily, the bus was not full and we each got our own set of seats to sleep in. That is until some cute chick got on at one of the stops and the mean bus man made Julian come sit with Mattie so that the cute chick could have her own set of seats... Whatevs. When we arrived at the border around 4am, some guy got on asking for our passports. We gave them to him and then followed him around. He then says to us, "Money, I stamp!" over and over until we give him $3 USD each. He then disappears on his motorbike into the darkness towards the border. Mattie goes back on the bus to sleep and Julian gets some coffee. A few hours later he reappears and gives us our passports back and they are now stamped out of Laos. So he basically took our money for nothing and not knowing any better we were taken advantage of. At 7am we were allowed to cross the border. First we were quarantined until they deemed us not in poor health. The rest of the process went very smoothly. No lines, just the Vietnamese passport guy wanting $1 from us to return our passports... This is the westerners tax. It's a good thing Julian brought a bunch of one dollar bills with him! After everyone made it across the border, we sat waiting on our bus for 2.5 hours. Mattie got frustrated because nobody spoke any English to let us know what was going on. Apparently there was some problem with the cargo the bus was carrying. Either way, we eventually got back on the bus and on our way. People in Southeast Asia generally drive like crazy mad-men, but this driver was insane! I'm extremely surprised we didn't run over any motorbikes. The big buses just drive and lay on their horn and if you are in the way then you better move because brakes don't seem to exist to them. About mid-day, they dropped us on the side of the street in Hue and we were still in possession of all our limbs, fingers and toes!
- Mattie and Julian
Location:Vientiane, Laos
This is your scariest story yet---I would NOT be very happy if some guy took my passport and rode off into the darkness and did not return for hours--- So glad this turned out okay--- sounds like a bad movie script!
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