Leaving Laos and Hanoi

After our motorbike tour we went to the local bus station with the aim of booking a coach to Hanoi in North Vietnam. We had read that there were daily coaches from the town and they took a full 8 hours less than the 24 hour bus from the capital of Laos. Unfortunately the lonely planet had lied to us and the bus was only twice weekly. Instead we would have to take the 6 hour bus back to Vientiane and then get the 24 hour bus from there! This sounded pretty bad to start with but when the bus broke down 2 hours into the journey it became much worse. We ended up sitting in the midday sun for about 4 hours waiting for another bus to pass by. When this eventually happened it was of course full so we spent the next 4 hours sitting on plastic stools in the aisle! 

The bus to Hanoi wasn’t too bad really; except that we were lied to about it having beds, it drove back over the same route we had spent the previous bus ride doing and it arrived at the border in the middle of the night meaning we had to spend 6 hours just waiting for the border to open.

4 men on a motorbike

We didn’t really do too much in Hanoi apart from drink and wander around. On one particular night I drank far too much and ended up getting lost. The point at which I regained my memory was as I was pushed/fell down some stairs by some annoyed Vietnamese guys in some sort of fancy uniform. That earned me a nice cut on the knee that ended up lasting over a month (yer that’s how far behind the blog is). A few days after that we went out to Ha Long bay for Christmas but there isn’t much to say about that as we were drunk pretty much constantly the entire time we were there!

The other interesting point from Hanoi is that I spent all the money in the next picture on Pete’s Christmas present and he did the same for me…