Leaving Laos

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So I haven't written much in the past week but its because I have been having so much fun. Laos is a beautiful country and I've had a great group of people to experience it. Out of the group from the slow boat last week, I've managed to stick with a large group more or less and we've been having a blast.
We left Luang Prabang on Saturday morning to head to Vang Vieng. The bus ride although EXTREMELY winding had unbelievable views. The landscape was bright green with early morning fog in some of the valleys and huge mountain peaks everywhere. Beautiful. And the view in Vang Vieng was pretty similar with huge hills and limestone cliffs surrounding the town. That being said, Vang Vieng was nuts!!!!
It was a town meant for partying and partying alone. My first night there I had a terrible cold and wasn't feeling great so I tried to stay in a head to bed early. But the constant techno music fromt he outdoor bar across the river from our hostel made that difficult to do even with ear plugs. Luckily i did feel better in the morning and yesterday we went tubing...and by tubing, I mean partying.
For those of you who haven't heard about this (or haven't been here for a few years) you tube down the river and there are little outdoor bars on either side of the water for a bit. All of them have either crazy rope swings (super high), or zip lines or, mud pits, tug or war pits, or in one case, a giant slide. So much fun but it definitely resulted in lots of bumps, bruises and soreness today from bad landings. We started around 12:30 in the afternoon and we managed to get to all the bars but we didn't leave the last one until the sun was setting, and being stupid we didn't realize that it still takes 2-3 hours to tube back to town. So after nearly an hour and a half of tubing in the dark we found a bit of river where we could climb out and catch a tuk tuk back to town. The day was AWESOME and definitely one of the funnest and craziest days of my life!!!
Today, we a bunch of us dragged our sore asses out of town and have headed to Vientiane where we're gonna spend one night before going our seperate ways to either Vietnam, Myanmar or Southern Laos. Its been a ton of fun having a group of 10+ people in these towns taht I know and I'm hoping to meet up with lots of these people again before I leave. I'm going to be a little sad to say goodbye to them tomorrow but it will be fun to start fresh when I get to Hanoi.

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