at least I had a double seat and an ambien

I am usually not one to complain about bus or car rides. I'll hop on a 15 hour bus ride without thinking about it. I'll drive 12 hours by myself and think most of it is fun. However, I just came off of the longest, and probably the worst, bus ride ever. I bought the ticket in Vang Vieng, Laos to go to Hanoi,Vietnam for roughly 25 dollars. To fly it costs at least 120 or 130. So I thought, how bad could it really be? Even once I got on the bus I was thinking, "What is everyone complaining about with this bus ride? It seems fine to me so far. They must just be complainers." well.
After 3 1/2 hours we got to Vientiane, where we then had to kill 2 hours then report back to this travel agency, where then we waited another hour, then were taken to a bus station where we had to wait a little more. Finally we got moving. Exactly 8 minutes into the ride, we start literally rocking back and forth like the bus was going to tip over. And I'm really not being dramatic here, we almost tipped over because we almost hit a scooter. We missed the guy by like 2 inches. So that was a fun start to the ride, and this also called attention to the fact that the bus itself was not the most stable thing in the world. It felt like what I would imagine a bus for those weeble wobble things would be.
So we stopped a lot, in fact it felt like we hardly drove during the night at all. We were just stopped somewhere and everyone was sleeping for a long time. Then we drove a bit more and got to Vietnam immigration, where no one would tell us what the fuck was going on, and we ended up standing around waiting for some unknown reason for about 2 1/2 hours, meaning we had been at the border for 3 hours. We continued on through the day, sometimes dropping off people, sometimes dropping off random bags of stuff(maybe animal feed? I truly don't know) to villages, wobbling around the road, sometimes really hot, mostly freezing from the air-conditioner. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that there were Asian music videos playing for most of the trip. Thank God for mp3 players.
At one point in the afternoon I thought we were getting close, then I saw a sign for Hanoi in 230 Km. So after many more hours of Lao and/or Vietnamese people not telling me or the other two white people on the bus(2 guys from Denmark) what was going on, we FINALLY got to Hanoi. I know this doesn't exactly seem like some harrowing journey. But when you consider all the annoying factors, mostly the fact that no one was concerned with getting anywhere or explaining anything the whole time, and add to it the time of the journey, it was pretty bad. Basically I was bound in some way to a bus(not necessarily on one) from 10 am until 7:30 of the following day. That's 33 1/2 hours.
This is exactly the kind of whiny blog I would never want to read. You guys asked for it.