Tubing, buckets and a day of muchos drunkeness.....

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Woke up quite early to a power cut (damn no cup of tea!) but gives me no excuse not to do some yoga so make the most of the balcony, but afraid this one only has a running tap rather than a waterfall in the background, ha! I imagine power cuts must be common here as the main restaurants have generators so i manage a mint tea elsewhere before we set off tubing for the day.... Well this comprises of hiring a huge inner tube and taking a tuk tuk to the river and floating down in the tube, with bars a plenty in between, we get chatting to a girl, Linda from Ireland and together we trek to the tubing start point where the first bar is, all agreeing how we'll save the alcohol until after and be sensible and do the tubing first, well this really goes to plan with the first bar we arrive at we get offered a free shot, how can we resist a free shot ha,!? Karen is good and does tho, well done!! Linda and me down it in one, oh dear, well the thought was there!!! The vibe is actually really amazing in this place and their playing great music, electro / tech stuff so just my cuppa tea! I now have the dilemma that i don't want to leave as the music is too good but i want to get some tubing done before getting stuck into any 'buckets'! Well we decide on tubing to the next bar which is literally opposite this one and a few minutes in a tube, this is so funny and i actually get the whole tubing thing now! Only i wana drink and i wana get back to the bar with the good tunes, so we take our tubes back there and end up spending the rest of the day there drinking buckets having loads of fun, the only way i can describe it to anyone back home is imagine Bora Bora back in the day but with mountains in the background and the friendliest vibe ever!! This is Vang Vieng. Already I've decided im gonna love it here, oh and it's not just full of 18 year old gap year students as i'd expected, just people out wanting a good time in between their travels :-) We then realised we had to get our tubes back by 6pm or we'd lose the quite hefty deposit so we make a drunken but hilariously funny attempt to tube across downstream, but the current isn't going anywhere (ok maybe in our drunken state that's a good thing!!!) so we get out at the opposite bar, grab the nearest tuk tuk back, and hey presto have our tubes back with half hour to spare before 'fine' time!! I've already decided i want to do it again, but next time im gonna tube first down the river and THEN drink! Now i know the knack to it ha!
We then grab some dinner before hitting the town, we notice 'happy' menus everywhere, the funniest one being an Indian that didnt have a single indian dish on the menu, i'll leave the rest of what it did have to your imagination,but i decided when in Rome a shroom shake would be fun, well we get talking to this Aussie girl, Jenna but for reasons that will become clear we decide to name her psycho bitch!! She tells me how i can get a shake for half the price if i come with her, so after we'd hung around with her for ages, her bragging about how she'd made 60 k for some bar in Cambodia (more like lost, haha!) we did some shopping where Karen and me bought some cool tubing tops and PB starts asking us to lend her money so she can buy stuff too.... hmmm, already alarm bells ringing!! But she's promised this shake for half the price so we go to this bar, where suddenly the price has doubled! And on the way she's not only asked me to lend her money but offered to re-make my top for me, so not only is she after my money but the shirt on my back - at this point it had actually got really funny! We then decide it's probably too late to touch anything slightly hallucigenic with the Laos curfew time of 1130 so make our excuses to PB and buy a good old bucket of vodka redbull from a place called Bucket Bar! Music was a bit too commercial for my liking, but people were friendly and it was good to chat and wind down over a bucket... We then moved on to a bar called QBar where Jenna (PB!) had promised me free drinks all night coz her boyfriend was playing there, this is when it got really funny as her boyfriend spent the whole night slumped in a corner in no state to even get up let alone get on the decks, she looked much the same - obviously some other poor fool had fallen for her tales of woe and given them money for their shakes, ha! Seeing them i was glad i'd stuck to my bucket, ha!! Well Qbar was another really commercial bar but great people in there and got chatting to loads, is great for drunken banter and we both had a great night, actually thankful for the early curfew as we had another early start with our mountain trek in the morning........

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