From in the tubing to returning home

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We arrived in Laos' capital, Vientiane, after a back-bending, mood-shittening overnight bus ride with an alcoholic Dane on a Visa run who looked like a melted Darren Clarke, a Scottish girl with her life in a backpack and a travelling professional photographer from Michigan. We sat on the side of the road wandering when our bus was going to leave and whether there would be more on offer for breakfast than the assortment of ice-creams from the local vendor.

Helen, one of the three English girls we were to spend our time with here, approached me by telling me that I look like Matt Damon. On hearing this John put it forward that he looked like Johnny Depp, as someone (presumably with bad eye sight) had claimed previously on the trip. I'm not sure if they were more impressed by this claim or that his 'Movember moustache' was now in full bloom.

We arrive in Vang Vieng and Loas makes Thailand feel like a developed country. As we're driving in the bus is bumping up and down and the dust is getting in my lungs. When we depart the bus John puts it to me this is what travelling is all about and I agree. It's the differences and the unusual challenges that make the adventure what it is.

The place we were staying in had none of the advertised amenities. The hot tub was a giant concrete cereal bowl with no water in it, the sauna was just a room with no air con, and the advertised tree houses were sheds. But for $3.30 per night no-one was complaining. I was loving what was set up to be a semi-camping experience. In contrast to the last place which allowed people to vegetate in front of on-demand English-speaking television and free internet. This place was already better for me and it only had a light bulb, a table and few hammocks for atmosphere.

I woke up the next day needing to sort out travel back to Bangkok for three days’ time. I got horrible twinges of worry and anxiety when I talked to the guy I was booking the overnight bus with. I've spent my life learning the hard way and I had a flash forward to the bus being late, getting an overpriced taxi from Bangkok city to the airport and missing my plane. An international flight is one thing you don't want to fuck around with, especially when you are due to start a job in a couple of days after you're scheduled to return. A ran back and forth between the internet cafe and travel agent and eventually settled on a private bus to an airport immediately over the Thai border followed by a flight direct to Bangkok airport leaving me a day to spare.

Frequently in life I'm described by friends as an idiot and this incident may go some way to explaining why. Running back to the hostel stressed from the transport booking and with everyone waiting for me to go tubing, Erika askes me if I want to be sprayed with insect repellent. I hadn't thought about it before, but there was likely to be bugs down the river so I agreed. I ran outside and rotated round for her to spray me all over. Everyone was laughing at what I thought was my spinning round. In actual fact, she wasn't holding a can of insect repellent; it was a can of acrylic paint. And it wasn't a spray to prevent insects biting me, it was massive black penis. To make matters worse, I got frustrated that she'd stopped spraying and took the can of what I thought was insect repellent to spray myself only to see black acrylic lines all over my body. I originally thought everyone was laughing with me, in fact they were laughing at me. We got in a TukTuk to go tubing and I really wasn't in the mood.

I hadn't expected to enjoy the tubing, but it was absolutely fucking wicked you'd have to be the most miserable of miserable bastards not to enjoy it. I'd been to water parks when I was a kid. This was like one of those, but with no health and safety and cheap alcohol. We were cautious not to act like a dickhead like we've all done on nights out because sixteen people had died here from being dickheads throughout 2011.

Free whisky shots galore, a lack of food before I came and the adrenaline of the stress from booking my transport got me drunk and excited pretty quickly. Luckily I didn't do anything more stupid than lose a contact lens, lose a tenner to an opportunist Laotian boy and graze my back on a rock from the rope swings. We finished and sat down in a mediocre restaurant and vegetated in front of an episode of 'Friends' whilst scoffing plates of noodles.

Later at the hostel Kimpton and I made some good conversation with some incredibly attractive Swedish girls. The kind of attractiveness that would make you um and er about approaching them in a night club. But this was travelling, the rules are different and it means that everyone is open and needs to communicate. Plus, if an attractive English girl walks in the room she'll know it and everyone else will know it. But Swedish girls are so used to being surrounding by such attractive people that they don't even realise how attractive they are to a non-Swedish eye. I imagine a night out in Sweden to be like walking into a Burberry shop, only everything is affordable. So there we were having banter, reading random books with them in a variety of accents, including posh english, Swedish, Scottish, gay and dirty Thai lady boy. They taught us some Swedish and we were having a whale of a time.

The next day tubing was equally awesome but slightly different for me as I was relaxed rather than stressed as I had been the day before. John cut his foot in the river, wrapped it up in the shitist of medical kits and would later join the pissed up swimming shorts and bikinis in desert boots and jeans. I went to town on the jumps and rope lines always wanting to try a backflip, but achieving nothing more than water up my bum and a slapped back. Kimpton realised he was a bit too drunk and treated himself to a bacon sarnie. We stayed later than we expected playing football and drinking more buckets.

When I played football in the park as a kid I never had fucked-off-their-face south-east Asian twenty somethings descend on my game. So I can only think it's a strange education for a Laotian when you're playing your after school football match and a fucked pasty westerner scores a goal only to start pulling the gourgeous bikini clad Canadian in goal.

We got the sort of "who's paid their share" and lets start chanting TukTuk ride that you might expect on the way back from a uni night out to a restaurant in town. One of the preston lads we'd met started, with Kimpton, a rediculous, petty and overblown arguement over throwing chilli sauce and water. No really. We walked back to the hostel hoping the preston lad would remember he was a twenty-eight-year old accountant and not a six-year-old in the primary school playground.

Unlike the previous night the vibe tonight was to hit the town and everyone changed accordingly. I left my towel in the previous hostel and my underwear feel and smell like they've been worn a couple of time so I remained in the swim shorts I'd tubed in. It's times like these where I really think I'd have had a better life as a pig rolling around in shit.

Kimpton and John went home after about half an hour with Kimpton drinking a few too many 70p whisky buckets. I followed the other hostellers to the next bar and eventually walked back with one of the Swedish girls. I'm not usually fan of snuggling but snuggle we did in a hammock until we drifted off to sleep. And dare it, it was actually really nice just to lie there. Ending up lying in her bed together I felt like her drawing to me was more based on alcohol than my attraction to her as she fell asleep with her hand on my thigh.

I woke up thinking about an opportunity missed. Said an aprupt goodbye to John, Kimpton, Erika, Kate and Helen. I've known Kimpton and John for ten years and those girls for three days, but in that moment it felt like we'd all known each other the same time. I got on the minibus alone and it was dreamy.

As the driver avoided pot holes and oncoming traffic, I looked out the window and watched the world go by. Laos was enough of a developing country to genuinely broaden your mind, tubing was orgasmic. And the stamp took up a whole page of passport, making me look like a savvy traveller rather than the middle class, Home Counties boy travelling a well-trodden backpacker route that I really was.

Thai/Loas immigration was deliciously smooth. I arrived at Udon Thani airport raring to catch up on the blog. Essays were always a chore but the blog's been addictive. When I'm rehearsing for a play I'm constantly thinking about the lines, similarly I've been constantly thinking about the blog out here. The internet I found was ridiculously frustrating and the price of the pot noodles was equally so. But then I just stopped caring, sat down, rested my feet on my backpack and read my book.

Swift flight to Bangkok and I arrive with sixteen hours to kill. Sleeping in a bed is quite monotonous, so I always welcome the opportunity to catch some shut-eye in unusual places. I guess the airport wasn't all that different though. Instead of a bed I had a wooden bench, instead of pillow I had my backpack and instead of my morning cup of tea, I chatted to the morning cleaner.

I'm writing this in Dubai airport 34 hours into my 44 hour door-to-door journey home that has taken me from Vang Vieng to Udon Thani to Bangkok to Hong Kong to Dubai to Gatwick to home. The decision to stay in swimming shorts the entire time for the above mentioned reasons has proved catastrophic as I am now receiving chafing in places I don't want to receive chafing.

One more thing. I unintentionally left my phone on for the entire flight from Hong Kong to Dubai. No-one died as a result, but arranging contact with my parents to pick me may now prove difficult. That is, if they still want to pick me up after following this blog from the beginning and realising that they've given birth to an embarrassment of a son.

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