I was a bit sad to leave Luang Prabang. I think I could have stayed there for a few more nights. A week even. But my traveling companions were keen to get to the mayhem of Vang Vieng and well, I was fairly keen to see what all the fuss was about. I’d read in the Lonely Liar that Vang Vieng had been a bit spoiled by the influx of tourism and the wasted westerners that flocked to the river to ‘Tube’.

The town area itself was not particularly pretty, just lots of guesthouses, restaurants with cushions playing Friends and Family guy on repeat and fake Rayban sunglasses shops. In the background, if you looked up, the limestone Karsk cliffs that tower over the river showed a beauty that has somehow been overshadowed by the ability to make any milkshake, tea, pizza or pancake ‘Happy’ for an extra 2 dollars.
The river was lovely though and if you ignored the neon signs, you could fool yourself into being somewhere else in Laos.

So, tubing. What is it? Think tractor tyre inner tubes. Sit in them. float downstream. That’s it.
‘Don’t take ANYTHING with you’ I had been warned. ‘Don’t even get a tube as people will nick them’ people advised. So I packed my ‘waterproof’ bag with loads of stuff, hired my tube and got in the tuk tuk that was to take us 7km up stream.
The first bar was pumping out hard electro and the platform on which people were dancing was verging on collapsing into the river. Everybody seemed to be inebriated and there was a general ‘Spring Break’ vibe to the whole valley. People flung themselves off trapezes and slides and ledges and swings into tubes and floated off down the river towards the next bar shouting and hollering about how much they loved Laos. As the thudding ‘um-te um-te um-te um-te’ of one bar faded, you’d be met with the cries of the next bar’s Laos staff trying to lure you in from the water to sample whatever delights they had to offer, praying that you would dance on their platform, to their music and drink their magic mushroom milkshake. Tyres and plastic bottles on ropes were hurled at you as you floated past for you to grab and be pulled in on. One bar gave you a free shot of Lao whiskey from a bottle containing a dead snake when you arrived, a free shot of Lao whiskey from a bottle containing dead bees if you finished the snake one and a free shot of Lao whiskey from a bottle containing tree bark if you managed not to throw up or hurl yourself into the river after the first two. Oh and a joint.
The afternoon culminated in someone nicking our tubes, the drybags being useless, mud-volleyball turning into mud-wrestling and a long swim home. Viva Vang Vieng.

I remembered at one point to look up and take in the beauty of the place but i think at that point i was hit over the head by a flying bottle on a rope.
As I didn’t take my camera, I have no pictures but click the link below and you’ll see what I’m getting at.

carnage

The next day was Halloween. We got painted up, messed up and wandered around. Olly’s head shrunk whilst I was on mushrooms. That’s all I can remember. Oh other than meeting a small set of twins sitting on a pool table. That might have been a hallucination though.

After 3 days of narcotics and feeling altogether very un-Lao, we had to sort ourselves out and escaped to a lovely lagoon and cave a tuk-tuk ride away. The triplets played in the lagoon whilst Billy and I explored the caves. Wearing flip flops in the slippy sloppiness was a bad idea so I hung back in the vast quiet cavern whilst Billy went deep with his flashlight. He was gone for nearly an hour and when he returned he was slightly sweating and didn’t seem quite the same. He said he saw things in there. Scary things. Maybe he was still recovering from the mushroom shakes.

On a tight schedule, (and wanting some normality) Billy and I left Tom and Olly the next day and travelled back to Vientiane. After all, I had left my passport there for the last 2 weeks at a guesthouse. Ooops…

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