The black hole

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hello! We are in Vang Vieng, Laos now and about to hit the river for some tubing. I thought i would transfer some photos first so here i am. craig is still napping as we had a great wakeup of 4 men shoveling a 10 foot high pile of gravel outside our window and carting it away at 8:30 am. of course they stopped as soon as i gave up trying to sleep and finished showering.
the journey here was absolutely crazy. we took a bus for about 6 hours to a town called Chiang Kong where we stayed in a guesthouse where everything was pepto bismal pink. the walls, curtains, mattresses, blankets. quite funny. we met an english 'bloke' from near Liverpool named Kev who is still travelling with us now. The next day we took a two minute boat ride across the river to Laos and got our visas..... i gotta run actually so i will finish this off after tubing!

ok i am back. it is now 8pm the day after we went tubing. the power has been off all day and only just came on recently. we have had this happen in many cities. i think it is because of the construction they are doing here. apparently they only got electricity in this town in 1995. Anyway, when we got our visas we had to pay $42, everyone else pays $35 or $30. for some reason they don't like us Canadians i guess. we bought a ticket for the 2 day slowboat to Luang Prabang where we would get a mini bus to Vang Vieng, home of the river tubing. we ate breakfast and bought 'supplies' which was mostly beer and whiskey and a few bags of chips/cookies. very healthy diet. it was difficult to figure out the money at first. Laos kip is difficult to read and the exchange rate still has me baffled. another interesting thing is that they drive on the same side as us back home. thailand is opposite. The 7 of us got on our slow boat which was way more uncomfortable than we expected. good thing we thought to buy butt pillows for $1 at the store. there were 7 guys on the boat that our friends Corey and Amanda had been running into every once in awhile on their travels. a few of them are from Toronto, one from Australia, and two of them are IRISH!! of course i made fast friends with them. they had a couple of guitars and a bongo drum and we sang songs and drank beer/whiskey and pretty much had the best two days ever. most of the rest of the boat wasn't too happy. Our butt pillows were stolen by a man in the tiny town we stopped at in between boat rides. he was carrying them for us because he wanted us to go to his guesthouse but we didn't and he never returned them. of course it is our faults for not remembering. oh well. the next day when we went to get back on they put us on a different boat where we had to sit on the floor and two boats over we saw the 'older' people waving happily at us. they managed to switch boats and were quite thrilled about it. i don't blame them but i still think we were having way more fun. two girls from halifax that we met in Chiang Kong were on our boat the second day and we met a couple other girls from Scotland. So now our group has turned into 18 of us which is great.
We went to a town called Luang Prabang where we had to seperate into two hotels as they couldn't accommodate so many people. we had dinner together and then we went bowling! it was pretty fun but the games didn't last very long and you had to pay for each game so most of us only played two games and then got into the beer again. another late night but fun as well. we returned to our guesthouse, unsure of the next days plans. some people wanted to stay a day as the town has a few attractions to see but most of us just wanted to get to Vang Vieng. We found the other guesthouse the next morning and learned that they had booked us two mini buses leaving in an hour so we ran back to our guesthouse, packed up our stuff and took a Tuk Tuk to the ATM and back to their guesthouse. then we got some breakfast and finally we all piled into two big vans for the 6 hour journey. the ride was absolutely horrible. it was as windy as the 762 turns to Pai but had a much higher elevation and continued up and down, up and down for 6 hours. i had my motion sickness wrist bands on and i took two of my ginger gravols but i still had to get the driver to pull over once the gravol wore off. i was good to go after that though and made it the rest of the way. i have never seen potholes the size of mini coopers though! the roads were covered with chickens and pigs and ducks and cows. little tiny cliff-side villages dotted the mountain road along the way and the view was gorgeous. too bad i was too sick to see most of it =/
we stopped at a tiny village for drinks and a bathroom break. this is where i got the scare of my life. one of our new friends, an Aussie named Tim, was drinking a can of pop and out of nowhere the can goes flying and he smacks his head off the van and starts convulsing on the ground. everybody freaks out and i am bawling my eyes out and holding his hand while his eyes roll back and he starts foaming at the mouth. then blood comes pouring out and the Laos people shove a metal spoon in his mouth and start biting his toes. it was the scariest two minutes i've ever witnessed and i felt like i'd aged ten years afterwards. we were all so shocked. it turns out he is epileptic and nobody knew about it. he is ok now but we are watching him like hawks. we eventually left after it was determined that he was ok and finished the drive. We got to Vang Vieng at about 8pm, ate some dinner and found a hotel room. Laos people are constantly trying to rip you off as much as they can so you have to be careful. they told us they only had 2 rooms for 100,000 kip but we told him we were going next door then and he quickly changed his mind and gave us the worst room in the place for the same. we were just glad for a place to sleep. everyone took it easy that night to prepare for tubing. we were awoken as i wrote earlier by the gravel-shoveling Laos men at 8:30 am and then we finally got to go tubing! we rented tubes and they wrote big blue ink numbers on our hands so we could get our deposit back at the end. of course the ink was everywhere at the end of it. we took a short drive to the drop off point and after coating ourselves in sunscreen, we set off. the water was cold at first but you got used to it quickly. about 30 feet down the river we hopped out at the first bar. craig and i had our very first buckets which was laos whiskey, sprite and a bottle of redbull. mine was pink of course! everyone had a go on the big rope swing (except me, the photographer) and then we moved on to the next bar. so this continued all day and the swings got bigger and better and slides and zip lines were thrown in. music was blaring at every bar and there was volleyball and everyone was having a great time. i went ziplining at the second bar which was insane. i did a crazy flip at the end when i hit the stopper and i couldn't breathe for about two minutes after i surfaced which was scary but i survived. the best bar has a gigantic metal slide that i went down on my tummy and tried to do a flip but i'm not sure it worked out as i landed smack on my back. my entire body is a bruise. most of the others aren't much better off, some of them worse. one of our friends, Robbie, went down the slide right after me and landed EYES first so he couldn't see the rest of the day and his eyes are still swollen and red. a few people went out to the bar after but i went straight to bed after eating the best curry i've had yet. i wasn't feeling too good at that point from too much sun and drinks.
the next morning we were awoken not only by the gravel shoveling but also to the source of the gravel appearing. it was pouring from somewhere above us into the pile every 2 minutes. great fun. we found our friends and everyone was in agreement that we would not go tubing again until the next day. of course we said it was because there was no power so the bars would not have cold drinks or music but really it was because we were all bruised from head to toe. we found a hotel with a pool and a river side deck and paid 20,000 kip each to hang out there all day in the sun. we relaxed, read books and listened to music all day and then had a nap because the power was due to be back on in an hour. sure enough, just as i fell asleep the power came on and our friends were knocking on our door to go for dinner. i had another good curry but the tofu wasn't as good. the lemon mint shake i had was amazing though. there seems to be an abundance of them in Laos which makes me happy. this is a big party town nicknamed the 'black hole' as it is hard to leave. i know we are tubing again tomorrow and then i'm not sure what our plans are. the island we wanted to go to next just had a big monsoon and apparently the weather is terrible so i doubt we will be going there for awhile. our crew is breaking up slowly over the next few days i believe so soon it will just be Craig, Corey, Amanda and I which will be great as well I am sure. I am looking forward to the beaches!
p.s. I am still white as a ghost and even in the dark I had two Laos teenage boys greet me when I got off the river and one carried my tube for me while the other one offered me his sandals and entwined his hand with mine for the walk back. it was cute. there are christmas trees and decorations everywhere here. it's hard to believe that it's december.

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Photos

Slide
Who would have thought?

buckets
our first buckets!

superman
craig and his famous superman pose

zipline
my first zipline