Vang Vieng - the place where you keep on bumping into travellers you've met

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The moment I enter Vang Vieng, the first thought that came into my head was "why the hell did I come here?" Everyone's been telling me so many great stories bout VV and this is it?? At first sight, the town looked absolutely hideous with no greenery, just red earth with lotsa dust. Then when I walked to the river, I fell in love with this town. The scenery was so amazing I think I could stay here for a week.

The highlight of the trip was tubing from upstream Nam Song back to the town. The riverbank is full with bars (equipped with trapeze-like rope you can do stunts with and jump into the river) and restaurants. And there were so many "things" up for offer...like ganja, opium etc. I was with 3 americans, and they were pretty heavy drinkers. Stopped at a few bars and got pretty hammered half-way. I puked into the river a couple of times, the 2 pommies tubing behind me got quite pissed with me :p Dont blame them either, like I dont wanna tube thru someone else's puke. It wasnt so much fun after that, the water became really cold by mid-PM and I was freezing my ass off.

Dinner later that night, I got so sick I almost threw up again by the sight of food. So we were chilling and trying to recuperate from the daytime activity before drinking again later :p The restaurants here all have tvs and the only program they show is Friends. If you spend a whole day there, you can probably finish 2 seasons of Friends. Then there're also Happy restaurants that serve everything "special"...like special tea, special pancake, special pizza, special baguette...well pretty much anything can be made special. I think I'd feel really special too if I spend another day here. So it was time to move on.

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