Life on the River, Vang Vieng, Laos

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Vang Vieng

We arrived at Vang Vieng at around 4am, feeling rough after the long journey which seemed to take an age, we went straight to sleep at the first guest house in sight. Up bright and early and feeling very hungry we stopped at the first restaurant we stumbled across. I had a look through the menu to order food and found that the last page was a menu of pizza and shakes made from magic mushrooms, weed and opium - crazy!!

The village in general is hugely chilled out. You can see that it is very much geared towards backpackers and has more of a Western feel to it than Luang Prabang. The bars are open past 11pm, the restaurants have ‘happy’ pizza's, mushroom shakes and opium tea on the menu and there is a strange phenomenon here called the ‘Friends’ bar. You either love or hate this concept. Basically the main street is lined with bars that play nothing but Friends DVDs throughout every open hour. There are about 5 of these bars and as you walk down the main street all you can hear is the theme tune, or canned laughter. I quite like friends but after a couple of days non-stop Ross's voice quickly became very annoying!

My time at Vang Vieng has become somewhat of a blur as we didn't do much here. It mainly consisted of tubing, then tubing again. The scenery here is nice - The whole village is surrounded with huge cloud topped limestone karsts that are reminiscent of Jurassic Park. In the mornings they look especially eerie as the jungle covered ridges are still draped with light mist weaving its way in between the vegetation.

The main attraction of Vang Vieng is the ‘tubing’. Tubing in a nutshell - Involves floating down the Irrawaddy River (I think) in an inflated tractor inner tube. You pay $3.50 to hire a tube, pile into a Tuk Tuk and make the 5km journey upriver to the start. The rest is pretty self explanatory; you walk to the river bank, plant your arse in your tube and float off down stream!

As you make your way along the river there are bars lining the banks at regular intervals. If you fancy a drink all you have to do is shout ‘Beer Lao’ and they throw you a rope to drag you in to shore. Each bar has a different trapeze, zip wire or cliff jump that you can use as many times as you like if you buy a drink. I cannot put into words how much fun tubing is. There is no better way to spend a day, simple but effective, floating along with a beer, getting progressively more drunk as you go, and meeting plenty of crazy people along the way!

We always spent far too long at each bar and ended up finding ourselves floating down the river in the dark. At the end of the tubing stretch, the river splits into a fork; left takes you to the end, and right……. well no-one really knows where right takes you, probably Vientiane! As we could never see the fork coming in the dark we always ended up frantically paddling to the left, then as the current was quite strong at this point, we would have a nightmare paddling over to the shore.

After taking a day to recover, we hired out some bikes went to visit The "Blue Lagoon". It is located 6 km outside the village. The journey there was really nice, admiring truly breathtaking scenery and making our way through small villages, past bathing water buffalo, the kids shouting ‘sabaidee!’ at the tops of their voices and running alongside the bikes. At the foot of the mountain there is a beautifully clear river but not quite a lagoon which was a godsend in our sweaty state. We spent a while swimming and jumping from the rope swing and overhanging tree before lying back and catching some sun.

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Photos

Ahh..Beer Lao the finest beer in world!
Yes even nicer than Carlsberg Export!!

Women Drivers!!
Nope they can't use canoes either!!