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Laos - Vientiane - Days 38-39
We took an early flight out of Hanoi and flew to Vientiane the capital Laos, it was good to get into a new country as we were up for a change after a month in Vietnam. We arrived in Loas 2 days before Lao new year. We had been told Luang Prabang was the place to be for Loao new year and as a result we only had one day in Vientaine and then the next day would be the 11 hour bus ride to Luang Prabang. Therefore our plan was to quickly sort out bus tickets for the following day and then see as much as we could in the rest of the day.
Unfortunately due to our little friend the lonely planet its massive inaccuracies and we ended up spending most of the day booking tickets, the lonely planet (now renamed the lonely b*stard) informed us the bus station was an easy 2km walk out of town........2km turned out to be 10km and a nightmare of an afternoon in 35 degree plus heat. We ended up trying to see the whole of Vientiane in 1 hr 30 mins at the end of the day which was a little tricky but we did manage to catch a few sights, which was a bonus!
The following day was the 11 hour journey to Luang Prabang which we had been told was a pretty horrible journey along twisting mountain roads. Lucky we manged to book ourselves onto a really nice VIP bus so that wasn't a problem. The journey would have been pretty pleasant apart from two elements. One was that Lao people seem to like loud cheesy music or Lao pop as it is known, in fact we had to listen to Lao pop being played through the bus speaker system at stupidly high volume for a 11 hours straight, it pretty much drove me and Tina crazy! The second issue was Lao people are more used to travelling on motos or walking rather than on buses along windy roads and as a result everyone on the bus apart from me and Tina seemed to be throwing up every five minutes! Its fair to say after 11 hours of this audio visual experience we were fairly happy to get off the bus in Luang Prabang.
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