Vang Vieng - A week with Friends

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For those of you who don't know Vang Vieng is famous in the backpacker scene for tubing down the Namsong River and watching Friends in all the bars. The scenery here was just gorgeous with the mountain range behind the river so to explore first we went kayaking (after enjoying it so much in Don Det). This was much more tame and started with us tubing through a water cave, sat on the tubes pulling ourselves along a rope for 350m in the pitch black, it was so cool! Paul spent the whole time making up stories about serpents and dragons living in the cave, which we found out was why none of the locals entered the cave for years with fear of serpents and ghosts living in there! We then got into the kayaks for the 8km journey down the river, the latter half of this was through the tubing section which was filled with bars, we stopped of for a game of big 2 with our guides.... fierce competition!!

That night there was the biggest storm we've ever been in with thunder and lightening going on all through the night, this meant for our day of trekking there were 2 issues. Issue 1 - the rain brought out all the leaches (Paul made friends with 2 of them and our guide was covered in them, mainly due to him trekking in crocs!) and Issue 2 - loads of trees were blown over and so our guide pulled out a huge machete to hack his way through the jungle!! We got to stop for lunch at a waterfall and to out shock the guide pulled out some coals and built a BBQ out of bamboo and we had delicious chicken kebabs! On the way back we walked through a cave and as we had no torch the guide shredded a piece of bamboo and set it alight for Paul to carry (feeling very manly). All in all a fun and active day.

We finally got to enjoy the tubing, which consisted of drinking games, Canadian friends, ropes swings and slides into the river. It was a fun afternoon especially when Rachel lost her tube in the current and was rescued by Paul and our Norweigan friend. To end the day we had a delicious Indian curry with the infamous Beer Lao. Safe to say the whole of the next day was spent sat watching friends and chilling in the bars.

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