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Published: February 5th 2009
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Pouring concrete
We have a new appreciation for building houses Another 6 hours on yet another bus twisting and turning through Laos' mountanous terrain, we arrived in a small town called Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is situated along the Nam Song river with beautiful limestone mountains in the background, although this town exists solely along the backpacker's travelling scene due to the number of bars that have quickly popped up along the river in order to service all of the traveller's floating aimlessly down on giant tractor inner tubes. Without the booming monopoly of selling tubes, I doubt if this town would even have been a blip on the radar along the bus route from Luang Prabang to Vientienne, although we're certainly glad it is because it breaks up the 10 hour journey nicely. Lindsay was even more excited about this town's existance because you can virtually stumble into any restaurant at any point of the day and watch episode after episode of the TV show "Friends." Imagine that! I quicky wished for 1,000,000,000 kip (come on, we're already millionaires here!) since Lindsay's prayers had obviously been answered with this discovery!
We found a guest house in our price range and headed out to eat. With my stomach still getting
back to normal, we opted for pizza...and Friends of course! As this is backpacker central in Laos, the food is very much Westernized, which normally we would revolt against, but given the situation it was great. In the morning (and about 6 episodes of Friends later), we decided to rent bicycles for the day to travel out to some of the sights around town. Our first stop was a 3 km ride out to the Vang Viene Organic farm. Ordinarily another farm wouldn't be something to mention, but this particular farm is unique because it is the first farm in Laos that we have been to that actually employs sustainable means of farming without destroying the land. What most travellers over to Laos will realize is that it is an everyday occurance to see entire fields being burned as it is the quickest way to turn over the fields and have them ready for planting again. Unfortunately this also causes the soil to become saturated with carcinogens and eventually that particualar field will be useless. Whether or not the Lao people are aware that this is terrible for the land, this is the most popular method of farming here as
the families need to constantly have the land ready for the next crop. The use of pesticides and other chemicals is also not regulated here like it would be back home, so this organic farm was started to teach the local people that there are sustainable means of farming wiout using the slash and burn method and without dousing the groud with harmful chemicals. Needless to say it was very refreshing to see someone taking responsibility. In fact, for travellers looking to volunteer, this is the perfect place! Whether you just want to offer help for a day around the farm or whether you want to devote a whole week or two teaching the local children, they could always use another hand here. Directly beside the organic farm there is a "refreshment stand" where you can buy mojitos and all of the proceeds go back to the local children. Not wanting to disappoint, we had a drink....for the children of course! From this point we could see the first bar along the river (and hear the loud music) and it was full of the days tubers. We decided that all of the hype about this place was true and were
excited for our turn down the river the next day!
Well, the next day didn't come for a few more days as the same bug that I had when we were zipping through the Gibbon's experience had come back (or maybe never really totally left) so we spent an extra couple of days just laying around, watching more Friends and a couple of movies.
Finally, on day 4 of being tubeless in Vang Viene, I felt up to attempting a day on the river. We decided to actually forgo renting the the tubes and instead we opted for the swimming method downstream as per other traveller's advice. I am normally the first one to point out that if you come all this way to do something, you really shouldn't cheap out of doing it all the way, but in this case, it made more sense to us to go the cheaper route. As mentioned above there is only one place selling tubes which has monopolized the town. Renting the tube for the day can be quite expensive when you're on a budget (55,000 + 60,000 deposit = ~$15 CDN/pp). The deposit is returned to you if you have
your tube back by 6pm, which is not the easist thing since most people end up drinking at the river bars until well after dark. Also, tubes tend to go "missing" throughout the day and if you are an unlucky one you could be stranded as well as losing your deposit. So we took the advice and swam, and enjoyed ourselves for free!
The idea of the day is to hop in a tube and enjoy as the current takes you down the Nam Song River. Somewhere along the line someone had the ingeniuous idea of setting up a bar along the way. Soon this morphed into the entire river being covered with multiple bars serving beers and buckets, playing loud music and offering giant rope swings and water slides for you to enjoy. Now when you tube (or swim) down the river, people from the bars will toss you a bottle on a string and pull you into their bar where you can endulge on the above! It is fantastic! We hopped from bar to bar trying out the giant swings which allow you to drop from insane heights, and others which have a spring attached at one
end so when you hit it your body gets flipped and turned like a helpless ragdoll leaving you at ther mercy of gravity! Again, fantastic! The last bar along the river even has a huge waterslide with a 4m drop off of the end into the river. We capped off the day, and our time in Vang Vieng, with a pizza and some more Friends!
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Janice
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reminds me of our trip to glasgow (sort of)
I love that you guys got to watch friends! linds, doesn't it remind you (sort of) of when we went to glasgow and spent a day watching friends at my cousin's!? so fun! also, that monkey picture is the cutest thing i've ever seen! great blogs!