Vang Vieng - Tubing in a wild west town

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We left Luang Prabang, shortly after finishing giving alms to the monks, to go the bus terminal via a tuk-tuk arranged from the hotel.
The scienic bus journey took around 5 hours passing through small villages and up the winding moutains, with great views all the way - When we arrived we quickly located a few guesthouses looking over the Vang Vieng river (the area we wanted to stay in) and quickly decided on a spacious room on the top floor of a guesthouse with views looking out to the mountains and river, with a huge balcony.

After watching the sunset, we decided to head out to the town to see what was on offer in terms of food and nightlife. The town, which is less than 15 yrs old and was only formed as a result of the tubing senstaion, is primarily made up of two roads which contain hundreds of small, almost identical restaurants serving western type food and showing either Family Guy or Friends episodes from 7am - 11pm everyday. We decided to choose the busiest looking one and settled in for a dinner of BBQ chicken and chips and a few drinks. Now up to this point the town had seemed almost tranquil and very low key (apart from the odd restaurant, which openly advitised Weed, mushrooms or opium in their menus next to pizza's, burgers and roasts - Bizarre) however, at around 8pm it seemed the town was over taken by zombjes - Infact they weren't zombies but hundreds of tourists coming back from a days tubing who were either injured, drunk, stoned or all 3 - It was amazing to see the transformation of a town in just a few minutes and it was something neither of us particually liked the sight of, especially as a lot of them were Westerners and clearly had little concern for the locals. We also wondered how they got into these states, but were about to find out the next day...

Up around 10ish to sunshine we headed out for breakfast of banana pancakes (Vic) and eggs on toast (scott) and fruit shakes before changing back at the hotel and going to rent our tubes for the day. The tubes are big rubber rings which you use on the river to float down it and hop from bar to bar all day - we heard people saying you dont even need the tubes anymore as you can walk between the bars but we got them anyway as it would be fun. We headed towards the river in the free tuk tuk with some French canadian guys and a group of 6 english lads who informed us the first bars and the best ones were further up the river and we were infact dropped at a bar called slide bar, which we later found out was actually one of the last bars, not at the start as we thought. So we started to walk the 10/15 minute journey along the river bansk towards the first bar which we had heard was the best, but Vic got a puncture in her rubber ring! We took it back to slide bar and thankfully they fixed it somehow, luckily as otherwise she would have lost her deposit and had no ring all day! For this we bought some drinks and were given free shots of Lao Lao whiskey on arrival which we had and soon realised how people end up the way they do at 8pm as it is pretty much illegal everywhere else in asia...

Slide bar was so named because it has a huge slide into the river, which is made from big white bath tiles and wood - all about health and safety here! Scott of course was quick to try it out and had a couple of turns on it (We laster found out that this was name death slide, as a few people had died on it - eek!). There was also a rope swing and a zip line, both suspended above the river which you land in afterwards, and many people were trying these out but we gave them a miss after people came out of the water with bright red marks where they had landed so hard in it.It started to rain heavily but once it had stopped we made our way with our french friends towards the first bar up the river, and were pleased we did as it was busy, played music and had a great atmosphere with people dancing and body painting eachother, although this wasn't usual body paint but industrial strengthed spray paint (nightmare to get off). We had quite a few drinks here, danced and got painted up and before we knew it it was 5pm - we had to get the rings back by 6pm to get our deposits back and we hadn't even used them yet! So we left and tubed down for about 5 minutes (both a bit worse for wear, Scott losing his sunglasses in the river in the process) before jumping out at the side and rushing back in a tuk tuk to return our rings. Luckily we made it with 30 minutes to spare.

We went back to the hotel and showered and changed before going out for something to eat and had decided to make a night of it, but after a yummy curry we were tired and everywhere was dead - people tended to come back to town either too drunk to carry on or have a sleep and then not wake up to go back out, so although there are plenty of bars there was no one out so not much atmosphere. We decided to call it a night before 10pm as we knew we would probably go tubing again tomorrow anyway after such a fun day!

The next day we were up again early, but nowhere near as fresh as the day before - we had breakfast but as it was slightly overcast we decided to just take a tuk tuk to the first bar without rings/tubes and have an easy day chilling and not drinking to much. Unfortunately, this idea lasted about 5 minutes and we quickly found ourse;ves playing beer pong with a guy and a girl who had been tubing for 30 days straight. As it was the first time we played, we lost bad, which meant downing beer after beer and after the second match we must have consumed 4 pints. We then made friends we a big group from NZ and spent until about 4pm drinking lao lao, cocktails and beer. We then headed accross the river to another lively bar where Scott played a game of football with some small Cambodian kids and Vic's chilled on a terrace with a couple of new born puppies.
We headed back to town at about 8pm, again both a little worse for wear before heading out for a bite to eat, huge pizza, a few drinks in a bar and then back to the hotel and bed.

We awoke the next morning determined to spend some time actually tubing down the river and after a couple of drinks in the first bar hoped in our tubes and set-off. Vic's for some reason thought it would onlytake around 90 minutes to float the 5km but when we were still in the river almost 4 hours later with the sun going down we started to worry a bit Luckily we were close to the finish and when we reached the end were informed that we were the only people who had made it the full way down in about 9 days - lol, hardly anyone makes it past the first bar.

We arrived back in town and decided we would move on to Vientianne (Capital of Laos) the next day and were pleased when we managed to book onto a 'VIP' bus for 8am the next morning. We had some dinner and played some pool before heading back, packing up and getting an early night in time for our bus the next day.

For breakfast the next morning, we both had fried chicken salad baguettes, which we had become addicted too in Vang Vieng (probably because it was one of only a few ediable things on most menus) before awaiting our bus.
However, our VIP bus journey, was infact a small mini-van which we would be stuck on for 4-5 hours but we both smiled at each other and hopped on hoping the journey to Vientianne wouldn't be too bad. . . . .

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