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When trying to get around indochina, one thing you may realise is that the odds of actually being able to end up where you wanted to go are so vanishingly tiny that you may as well hang the sense of it and just allow yourself to be pushed about by luck.

It had been advertised as a "VIP Air conditioned express bus", and was, of course, absolutely nothing of the sort. The photograph I'd been enthusiastically shown in the booking office was clearly of a different bus entirely, presumably one that had never been anywhere near Laos and was having a fantastic time filling itself with VIP's and chauffeuring them about in air conditioned luxury somewhere with actual roads. The monstrosity that I climbed onto was an ancient hulk of rotting metal that was utterly fed up with the abuse it had received over the last thirty years and registered the fact by screaming, backfiring and finally belching a cloud of acrid diesel fumes into the air before it had even been asked to move anywhere.

Now, before I continue, I should make it clear at this point that I did not want to go to Hanoi . I didn't have time to go to Hanoi, I had explained at the ticket office, because I needed to get into Cambodia and going to Hanoi wouldn't leave me enough time to do so. This utterly baffled the ticket Clerk, who seemed to be of the opinion that Hanoi was the only place on Earth that actually existed. Showing him the sign above his head that read "Tickets to Hue" or pointing at places other than Hanoi on the giant map of Vietnam on his desk seemed to do little to change his mind on the matter, but after an excruciating conversation that flowed like treacle through a straw, I managed to get him to sell me a ticket to Vinh.

The bus was filled to the brim with fifty or so travellers and their luggage, and left no spare seats, which made it all the more surprising when four hours after departure we stopped to pick up fifteen Vietnamese people, their shopping, a large fish and three baskets of live chickens. The shopping, luggage and chickens were all hoisted onto the roof whist fifteen small plastic stools were placed in the bus aisle for the people to sit on. I have no idea exactly what happened to the fish, but it made its presence known for the rest of the journey by mixing its smell with the exhaust and filling the bus with it.

We started the climb along broken roads through the jungle and mist covered mountains marking the border with Vietnam. I stared through the window

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