In one word "Wow" it is a beautiful country. To get there we took a night bus from Hanoi to Dien Bien Phu, the closest town to the northern border crossing into Laos, it's also the place where the French lost the battle for Vietnam.
In Hanoi we foolishly went to a travel agent to book the bus and were assured of a first class sleeper bus with beds designed for westerners, well, not quite but we did get an amazing disco bus.
The next morning we pulled into the very sleepy Dien Bien Phu at 6am, about half an hour after the bus to Laos left, so decided that the day would be spent visiting the 'sites', I.e. all the significant places where the French lost the battle there, including our last unbalanced Vietnamese museum, which interesting displayed amongst other things a wheelbarrow used by the Viet Minh during the battle.
Also it was our first experience of Bia Hoi, which is arguably the best beer in Vietnam and unfortunately we left to our final afternoon.
The next day we woke up at 4.45 as our bus was leaving at 5.30 and to ensure I didn't miss all the mountainous scenery along the border I'd bought an energy drink which I dually drank on waking up - enter Super Horse, I was awake, in fact I've never felt more awake and the 5hour bus ride passed in no time.
The bus dropped us off next to a river on the opposite side from the boats and the town and just by looking around we could see the 21st century was far behind us and the natural beauty of the landscape was breathtaking.
After an hour of eating and changing money we managed to share a boat with 3 other backpackers who'd been stuck there over night and chugged down the river in a very skinny boat to Nong Kiew.
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