The hotel pickup that wasn't

I'm now in the small town of Vang Vieng in Laos. It's a very tourist orientated town with pretty much the entire town dedicated towards tourism in some way. We're only here as a rest stop on our way to Luang Prabang which is still another 7 hours or so bus ride away (it took about 4 hours to get here from Vientiene). The place does have nice scenery. The photo below is one I took at sunset from the balcony of our guest house. The rock formations are something I am expecting to see in Hạ Long Bay rather than here.

The funniest thing though happened this morning. Over here, when you buy a bus ticket, they generally include a hotel pickup. This usually involves a tuk-tuk going around picking up passengers to take them to the bus station. This time wasn't quite the case! A guy did come over but just walked off once he got our attention. We followed him thinking we would eventually reach a van or tuk-tuk but this never occurred. It was dawning on us the further we walked that this wasn't really the pickup we thought it would be and that Laos really was different to the rest of South East Asia!