Phonsavan to Hanoi Highway 7

The hotel beds in Phonsavan were wonderful, and it was a real wrench to drag ourselves out of them at 6am. A quick breakfast of baguettes and eggs and we were back on the road by 7am. The road snaked it’s way out of Phonsavan and we were once more back in the hills. The landscape was similar to the day before with limestone cliffs to one side, valley or river down below on the other. The traffic was lighter and it definitely felt like we were heading to the middle of nowhere.

Soon we started overtaking trucks laden with hard woods; massive beams and squared off trunks of teak and mahogany. At the Laos/Vietnam border there were about thirty of these trucks parked up- half an ancient forest waiting to cross the border. It was easy to get out of Laos and quite painless getting into Vietnam. We were the only people there for the half an hour it took us to cross. Officials made a half hearted attempt to search the car and bags, and I thought about declaring the herbal tea bags, but as soon as the guard had sifted through some of Harry’s stinking laundry, he lost interest in us entirely.

Into Vietnam, we followed a wide, muddy river for a while before stopping for lunch. This consisted of bamboo soup (not too bad, and not something I’d had before), spare ribs, and a kind of fish that may well have been carp. There was a bowl of bean sprouts and morning glory and then a bowl of rather unappealing chicken giblets and bones. Needless to say, this was not a hit with the children and they poked rather dejectedly at some boiled rice while Harry demanded that we leave immediately and find somewhere better.

After this we headed into a more populated part of the country and picked up some faster roads. After the disaster of lunch, Harry was in a surly mood, so I plugged him into the PSP while the rest of us listened to a Dr Who audiobook. The batteries on the PSP lasted three hours which left us still 250 kms from Hanoi. The towns and cities were getting more built up and the the traffic was worsening. Large trucks and lorries kept our speed down, and as the sun set, the whole journey took on a nightmarish quality.

Oncoming traffic with full beams would appear on our side of the road as we were overtaking smoke belching juggernauts. Everyone blared horns and pulled in just in time. Soon the glare from the lights burned out our retinas and we realised the last 250 kilometres would take us five hours. We arrived in Hanoi fourteen hours after we had set off and we still hadn’t found the hotel! Jai told a motorbike driver the name of the road and he took off through the madness of Hanoi traffic, waving us onwards through a maze of streets. We were just about to give up when we saw the yellow neon name of the hotel. Relief! We had made it overland from Bangkok to Hanoi!