The trip up to Laos on the sleeper from Bangkok turned out to be not at all like the relaxed night I was expecting. I ended up sitting across from Anne-Marie, a lovely, mad Irish girl who forced me to drink all night without any sleep at all and has been bossing me around since we arrived here in Vientiane. We arrived at the Laos border with hangovers where they were busy digging up all of the concrete in sight then we caught a taxi into town with a load of dead fish in it.