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Our last few days in Vientiane have been pretty quiet. Our main aim has been to get our visas for Vietnam and to work out how exactly we are going to get to Vietnam. We eventually booked the bus to Hanoi which we had been trying to avoid at all costs. It's between a 22 and 24 hour journey and the stories we have read on the Internet have been far from complimentary about the trip. However, we have little choice other than to do this as its Laos New Year on Monday and most of the buses are not running. So we have booked the bus for Sunday night and leave at 6.30pm and will arrive in Hanoi at about 7.30pm Vietnamese time. We collected our visas on Friday afternoon and had to carry out a bit of negotiation with them as we had put that we wanted our visas to start on Tuesday rather than Monday. A quick bit of tippex later and it had all been sorted.
On Friday, we also visited the COPE centre which is a rehabilitation centre for Laos people who have been injured by unexploded bombs dropped during the Vietnam war. We watched a documentary called Bomb Harvest which was about the defusion and removal of these unexploded bombs. We couldn't believe some of the figures about the number of bombs dropped on Laos. Apparently 580,000 bombing missions were carried out in 9 years of the war on Laos alone which is one every 8 minutes and each of these bombing missions dropped around 100 bombs. Absolutely mental!!
Apart from that, we've just been wondering around in the heat and walking around the night market. The food here is really good and you can get pretty much anything you want.
We've liked Laos although too bee honest, it's probably our least favourite country of the trip so far. That says more about the other places we've been than Laos we think. So it's on to our 12th country tomorrow in Vietnam on a journey which we are definitely not looking forward to. However, we are very much looking forward to Vietnam and can't wait to get there.
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