I'm in Vientiane at the moment and we go to Vang Vieng tomorrow. Our bus trip from Vietnam yesterday was extremely long. We started at 7am (it was supposed to be 6:30am but we were a bit slow) and at about 5:30pm with half an hour to go the bus ran out of fuel. I guess something like that had to happen some time - at least it wasn't in the middle of the mountains or something. I don't know why it happened - we'd stopped at a petrol station only about an hour before. They were going to get another bus to come out and get us but we were also near a small town so the driver walked there and brought some petrol back so in the end we didn't have to wait too long. It was extremely hot and there wasn't much shade, but at least it wasn't the middle of the day.
Our last night in Vietnam was spent in Vinh, which is a rather large town but not one that many tourists go to so it's rather lacking in restaurants. We had the worst meal of the trip there. Mine wasn't quite as bad as the spam pho in Hoi An (I'm not sure if I mentioned that before), but it was also very expensive so that pushes it into first place for bad food.
In case I didn't mentioned the spam pho before... We had an overnight train ride (no sleep), a long day followed by a 'beach party' (very little sleep), then another long day and a very rocky overnight train ride (no sleep again) and then when we go to Hoi An we couldn't check in to the hotel. The leader decided to take us for breakfast at a nice place he knows... only it was closed so we went somewhere else. Pho is the traditional breakfast food of Vietnam and is basically noodle soup with herbs and meat. Since it was too hard for us to all order seperately we all had the same thing - pork pho. Only the pork turned out to be spam and the vegetables etc were unidentifiable and the soup itself was pretty horrible. It was already ridiculously hot for so early in the morning (about 7am) and we really didn't want hot soup, let alone disgusting spam soup. Then when we finished picking over the soup we had our orientation walk - follow the leader through the stupidly hot sun while trying to stay awake. It wasn't fun.
