Goodnight Vietnam

With the combination of my swollen legs, the bad weather and wanting to meet Leon in Laos we decided to sell the bikes & leave north Vietnam. We made a call to our contact Anthony who told us he could come straight out to see the bikes. We made a rush job cleaning the bikes only for Anthony to show up as I was screwing the front light back on! Whoops! He agreed on a price with the deal that we dropped the bikes over to his house, no problem! So we set off on the last journey on our bikes, a 2 km trip through Hanoi, simple no? Not for Colm, on the last trip as we our selling our bikes he managed to get in a crash. A lady braked suddenly ahead of him as he was turning a corner and down the bike went, resulting damage; broken clutch handle. Somehow Anthony didn't notice so he picked up the bike and kept going, we did have to admit the crash on arrival at the house though as he was sure to notice the missing handle!

The bus to Laos was the next night, we had been told the journey was at least 24 hours so we were prepared for a horrible journey. It started pretty much that way when the mini bus driver showed up looking for 3 people when we had 9, five of the extra 6 people squeezed into the bus and Colm was left on the side of the road along with my bag. He threw that on his back & jumped onto the back of a scooter, he claims the next 20 minutes he thought he was going to die. The guy pulled off before Col had even steadied himself on the back and torn through the rush hour traffic with Col almost falling off multiple times. The bus company we had booked does not want to pay the fees to use the bus station so we were dropped off at the side of the road to await the bus, after 5 minutes the six of us were separated from the rest of the group and shuttled to another road. Ten minutes after that we were shuttled away again! Eventually we were dropped at a bus wash and told to wait there. We met the Australian girls from the hostel who had had a much more aggressive journey involving their driver telling them to fuck off and trying to take their tickets back from them. Despite all this we eventually got on the bus and set off.

The next interesting stop along the journey occurred about 11pm when we stopped for food up in the mountains, the driver and a friend pulled up some seats, opened up the underside of the bus and proceeded to hide reams of jeans & tshirts in a secret compartment under the seats! Dunno why they had to smuggle the stuff into Laos but brilliant all the same!

We arrived at the border about 6am and eventually made it through sometime after 7am. We left Vietnam and were pointed into the mist for the 1.5k walk to Laos. The bets random meeting of the trip so far happened on this walk, who should walk out of the mist but Eoghan Murphy!! For those who don't know I work with Eoghan who is also on a few months leave, it also turned out that Alan knew Eoghan from Secondary school & Colm knew him from primary. I'd love to know the odds of meeting a cork lad that all 3 of us knew at a border crossing!






We finished our 24 hour bus journey in 21 hours so decided to head straight to Vang Vien to meet up with Leon. At this point we had a group of 6 so we picked up one more guy, Gav, at the bus station. We started talking about our last few days and the Halong Bay trip and discovered that Gav knew the American Deano who was on our Booze cruise. He had met him on the Gili Islands a couple of months ago, those odds must be as extreme as the ones for meeting Eoghan!

So we rocked into Vang Vien, got dinner and hit the bucket bar with no idea if Leon would be there. A few buckets in and sure enough Leon comes wandering out of the crowd. He hadn't expected us to make it to Laos at all and was hyped. Needless to say a boozy night followed.