Local bus hell!

We left the lovely Four Thousand Islands on Wednesday and booked ourselves onto an 8 hour bus journey to Savanakhet. The only buses that were available were local buses which we've been on before, they're usually hot, cramped and dirty but they're cheap and get you there in the end. However when we booked ourselves on a local bus in Laos, we weren't expecting this:

We also weren't expecting to be sharing our bus with live chickens!!! We squashed onto the bus with 14 other people and set off down the dusty bumpy paths of Laos on our long journey to Savanakhet. After 10 minutes we stopped and women carrying 8 sacks of live frogs got on the bus, the frogs were jumping around in the sacks, it was horrible! 5 minutes later we stopped again and a man loaded the bus with 4 more bags of unknown live animals! By this point we couldn't put our feet on the floor due to all the animals jumping around and flapping about. We stopped another three times after this so that people could load the bus with random live animals in bags and everytime we stopped we had women running to the bus trying to sell us frog satay and BBQ crickets! Its no surprise that Nikki and I skipped breakfast that morning. We stayed on this bus for two hours, and we were so glad to get off and change buses, which as usual didnt go smoothly. We were left wondering around the dusty town trying to find our bus, finally after an hour we managed to get on the right bus. The 8 hour journey turned into a 12hour journey due to the local bus stopping every 40minutes at horrible 'service stations' filled with goats and chickens (if one of us doesn't get bird flu i'll be very surprised!) It was so frustrating! The toilet stops included the bus pulling over to the side of the road for everyone to get out and pee on the side of the street (we didnt bother!)

When we finally arrived in Savvanakhet we were dusty and dirty and generally pissed off. And the 'fascinating city, tree-lined streets and beautiful french colonial buildings' (as the Lonely Planet describes it) was full of run down buildings and wild dogs! We checked ourselves into a lovely hotel:

I suppose you could compare this to a prison cell

And we decided to leave Savanakhet the next morning!

We woke at 7.30 the next morning to have a wonder around the town before we left, we thought it might look better in the sunshine. It was a very quiet, old town, we felt like we gone back to the 19th century, but some of it was pretty. We were going to go to the Dinosaur museum, a random attraction to put in the middle of no wehere, but there was no english so we didnt bother.

We left yesterday and arrived in the capital city, Vientiane, last night, which we much prefer!

Sadly, this is our last two days together. Due to Nikki's finicial situation she has to go back to Hong Kong and get herself a job asap. We're both very sad and it wll be very strange as we have spent every minute of the past three months together so it will be very wierd for me to be travelling without her. Nikki is obviously upset about leaving but is excited about seeing everyone back in Hong Kong. I'm going to head to Luang Prabang to meet Joel and do the rest of my journey wth him.

We're going to make sure we have an amazing last two days in Vientiane before Nikki goes south to Bangkok and I go north to Luang Prabang.