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Published: April 5th 2007
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One word to decribe Vang Vieng and the river that flows through it: superfungnarlystokedness.
As I was floating down a river the other day on a big black innertube, jumping off make-shift platforms and rope swings and zip lines doing nothing but having a killer time, I thought to myself there is no way life could get any better than this. I felt like I was a kid in Disneyland again, hanging out in a real life Robinson Crusoe setting. The towers are exactly like something kids all across the world would dream of making if it weren't for parents stopping and saying "no, you're not building a 30 foot tower out of scraps of wood for jumping into the river, it's out of the question." Well ha ha parents! We're doing it now, and it's awesome!
For 40,000 kip (kip is basically monopoly money, you can't exchange it for anything and it's useless outside of Laos, but you can also be a pseudo-millionaire!), you rent a tube which includes a tuk-tuk ride to the drop off point in the river. The first thing you see upon disembarking is a series of decks and platforms, small towers and
Travel-team
At the entrance to the cave poles with a spiderweb of zip lines and rope swings attached to them. The decks are largely made out of bamboo and scraps of lumber that have floated ashore, and at the base of each tower is a Lao dude selling beerlao out of a cooler. They of course make you buy one of their beers to use their swing, a requirement easily obliged.
The first zip line I took I didn't realize that you should let go before reaching the stopper, which sent me on an involuntary albeit graceful backflip into the water below, making my friends think I actually knew what I was doing.
Further down the river the bars turn into more ligitimate establishments with food and sand volleyball courts, and the swings get even more massive, plunging their victims into the river below with the occational backflop that make all the suburned falangs (Lao term for Westerners) stop their conversation and give a group "ooohh". The trip is supposed to take about 3 hours, but we stopped at so many bars it took us 7 hours to go a third of the way, forcing us to get a tuk-tuk back to town.
The
Best River Ever
I wish this was in Washington town itself isn't much to speak of. It's nearly all falang. Most of the restaurants serve a variety of Western and Thai food and have Friends, Simpsons, Family Guy or a football game playing on repeat all day. You usually sit on these elevated platforms with pillows and no chairs, and can take a nap if you want. I'm a little bit turned off by the notion of going all the way across the world and being in a culture totally new to us, and then just falling asleep watching TV after eating a cheeseburger. Long story short, I'm not learning much about the history and culture of the friendly Lao people in this town.
Yesterday I also went in a cave that was really cool. There is a spring coming out of the entrance, so you sit on tubes and pull yourself inside the cave with ropes. When you go inside about 100 meters you get off the tube and hike around inside. There's incredible rock formations in caves, amazing how the mass of the earth can actually sqeeze minerals out of rocks over millions of years.
Nighttime everyone usually goes out and gets some drinks at
whatever the "cool" hangout is in the town. Sitting in a bland hot guesthouse room usually isn't to appealling. Last night we went to an outside bar with little walless bungalows perched right next to the river. The late-night conversations with other travelers are one of the best parts of travelling, even though they almost always fall back to the topic of the differences and similarities of our countries, "wow, you go to school til 20?" and "what's it like living in a monarchy?" But the best conversations happen when you get through the smalltalk and start to discuss really incredible things about life and the world and what we find in ourselves when we go to new places, particularly places outside of the first world. Most people are at an interesting crossroads in their lives when they go backpacking, and engaging with people and trying to broaden our worldview through our late night rants is one of the best things to happen to us.
Saturday I fly to Phuket, ditching all my travel-buddies and the mountainous continental Asia in exchange for white sand beaches on postcard islands.
Did someone say half-moon party?
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Nic Nakis
non-member comment
That river got expensive!
Dude, I think it was only 20,000 kip when I did the river. Maybe even 12,000! You got the high-season rip-oof, I do believe... How much are they charging you for opium teas?