Nightrain to Laos

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After visiting with Ben and Merie in their super posh hotel. Niki and I headed over to the train station and caught our night train to Laos.
The sleeper trains are pretty awesome. Its pretty nice that you can get up and walk around as opposed to a bus where you're stuck in your seat the whole time. We knew drink options on the train were limited and the beer there was pretty pricey so we grabbed a bottle of Thai whiskey to bring with. That said we wasted no time heading up the restaurant car to find some drinking buddies. Right off the bat we found a cool German guy named Yahn who was willing to drink into the evening with us. A moment or so later we found a Russian girl named Nadia who while speaking very little english was still willing to drink with us.
A few hours later we called it a night and crashed out.
We woke up to some beautiful landscape going by. Its pretty easy to stare out the window at this foreign landscape and not catch much of what it all while you try to take it in. So I was a little surprised at the FIELDS of weed that we passed. Row after row of weed in various stages of growth. Sort of blew my mind!
Hours later we arrived in Laos and the most relaxed border crossing Ive ever been through. We walk up to one window, hand over your passport, walk up to another and they hand it back. All rather fast food like!
Four hours of bumpy bus ride later and we were in Vang Vieng!
Vang Vieng is mostly known as a backpacker haven where people from all over come to tube but look a little closer and you'll see theres quite a lot of culture to be had.
We checked into the first guest houuse we found, which is costing us about $8 a night. The currency in Laos is called the Kip and you get about 8000 of it to our dollar. So you can imagine how awesome it felt to take a million kip out of the bank machine!
A large beer here is about $1.25 and most fod is about 3 bucks!
Anyway, tubing in an hour! Pics to come eventually!

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