The sleeper bus from Vientiane departed at 5pm on the 27th and arrived at 7pm on the 28th. 26 hours of a bus ride is not fun. In hindsight I should have payed the additional $50 for a flight.
What made the trip so long was the Vietnam boarder. We arrived at the boarder at 2am even though the boarder security only showed up at 6am - why we simply didn't depart 4 hours later is beyond me. The boarder security was dreadfully inefficient, there were no English signs and a simple stamp in a passport would take up to 40 minutes. To make matters worse the infrastructure of the boarder was dreadfully incomplete. At one point we had to walk 1km through rain and mud to get from the departing gate of Laos to the Arrival gate of Vietnam.
Despite everything, I'm still kinda glad I made the trip because I got to meet a few cool Canadians and British people.
Once I arrived I made friends with an Irish bloke called Sean and a bunch of Germans and English people. We all decided to go out drinking at a place called 'le pub' (yeah, that's actually what it was called). There I ran into Michele and Marie! It was really great catching up! At 12:00 the bar tender pulled down the aluminum gate to the pub, closed the door, turned off the lights and told us to be quiet. I found out later that the city had a midnight curfew and the bartender wanted to avoid the attention of the police. At 3ish the bartender kicked us out though and advised us to go to another pub around town. Word on the street was this other pub was actually run by the Vietnamese Mafia who simply bribed the police to keep their doors open and music blaring all night long.
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