We’d made it to the border town Nam Can and decided to tackle the crossing in the morning.

We rose early and set out for the border, it was a brutal ride, all of 30kms on perfect roads. It was a terrific struggle… Not.

We made the border in good time and went to meet our fate at the hands of the Vietnamese immigration officials.

They stamped us out of the country no issue, but then we had to tackle the bikes. They directed us to move our bikes to the vehicle checking area and then redirected us back to the customs agent. At first the agent simply said no. And Blake was getting worried. Checked out of Vietnam the bikes would have to be left where they were if we couldn’t convince our agent.

It was time to turn on our now world famous charm!

Through rephrasing and pleading We managed to ascertain through broken English that it was in fact allowed for bikes to cross, but the issue lay in the Vietnamese officials believing that the Laos officials would simply confiscate our bikes and therefore were trying to protect us.

We managed to explain that we would take the responsibility and deal with Laos officials ourselves if we made progress across the border. We finally got an agreement and started receiving the paper work. Our customs agent explained it would be $50 USD for the bikes. After the formalities were done we were asked for $100,000 VND (approximately $5 USD) and nothing more was said. Nothing was said about our overextension of our visas either. We were feeling lucky!

We went back to our bikes to find that the whole border crossing on the Viet side shut down for lunch. So we had one last meal in Vietnam and when we finally grew impatient enough found and woke an official who cleared us through.

No mans land, all 100 meters of it…brutal!

Upon arriving at the Laos side it became clear that they endorsed the principle of a 2-3 hour lunch/sleep break as the border had a mass of people waiting and 0 officials present.

With nothing to do but wait we, slept. About an hour and a half later the officials all came down the hill from their break out area to resume work. I will be negotiating for Sth East Asia hours in my next contract!

We were prepared for everything, bribes, arguments, returning to Vietnam, we were not ,however, prepared for a simple hassle free quick process where we paid for our visa ($31 USD each) had our passports stamped and simply road off into Laos.

After the issues in Dien and the ridiculous journey to get here the process could not have been simpler and we could hardly believe it.

Gleeful and ecstatically ready for Laos we rode off…