Laos and Vietnam

First of all, I wrote a long text but magically the crappy computers in cooperation with the lousy internet connection made blogger dig up some 30 minute old draft of the ready text and I was so pissed off that I really wasn't in the mood of writing it all over again... But here is what is left of it:

Okay, I've been keeping busy. Since last post from Bangkok I have visited Laos and am currently in Vietnam.

I think I am slowly starting to master the art of solitary bus traveling on a crowded bus. Once again deprived of food and sugar ("I'm sure we'll have some time to eat before the bus leaves...") I was feeling a bit grumpy. Well, sitting fairly widely in my seat and listening to kitten-slaughtering metal on a deafening volume did the trick and the guy who sat next to me instead of the other free seat in the back of the bus decided that the rear seat was a better option after all. Of course if the bus had been totally full I would have been nicer but as the other person ahd a choice, I feel that I just guided him in to the right direction. And he wasn't a passenger but an employee of the bus so it's not like he paid anything... :)

But eventually the night bus arrived in Vientiane which was like a small town standing still after the hussle of Bangkok. You wouldn't believe that it is a capital city, so peaceful it was there. But the road was calling and after one night in the countrys administrative central the road took me to Vang Vieng, the local traveller ghetto. One peculiar thing was the amount of bars that were constantly showing episodes of Friends in the area. I wouldn't say that there was one bar for each season but you definitely had some choice when it came to choosing how old Jennifer Aniston you wanted to stare at. Mainly I was just tubing in there for a day before moving on to the 30 hour trip to Vietnam. So most of Laos I saw from a bus window and the main thing that I saw was the colour green. Really beautiful and green country.

The trip from Vientiane to Hanoi was something to remember. We had to leave Vang Vieng at around 1pm, change to a bigger bus in Vientiane after 4 hours and then sit in the bus for about 24 hours with the extra 3 hours that we spent at the border zone, waiting for the departure stamp and filling out forms. As Finland is a country that could easily be described as "mostly harmless" we got our 14 day visas straight from the border and had to pay 1 dollar for it. Fairly nice compared to almost everyone else who had to pay 40-50 US dollars for theirs.

On other news: my camera finally gave in and broke down. Some mechanical failure as the lens won't come out or come in properly. Too bad since I really liked the versatility of the camera and the features that are nowadays almost exclusive to SLRs. Top of the line a few years ago and big by todays standards, but still. I would really like to take pictures from such places as Angkor Wat for example.

And here I had a long description of Hanoi, but basically we just walked around the city, visited the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh and the Hanoi Hilton. Go see it for yourself, it is bound to be better than my descriptions of it. And that won't be lost somewhere in the internet.