Clouds of butterflies!

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Vang Vieng, Lao PDR - one of the highlights of my time away, to be sure. I walked through clouds of tropical butterflies! It was just glorious. So so beautiful.

Lucky me was sent to Laos again for work, from Monday 6 - Wed 8, and so took Friday before off and spent the weekend there. Vang Vieng is a beautiful town, situated on a river, and surrounded by these dramatic karsts - limestone rocks, with many caves within, and covered in green trees and shrubs. It's a really small town, catering mainly to travellers, though I was there in low season, so there weren't too many of those grubby backpackers. 😉 I just adored being there. I was staying in this lovely bungalow, with a great porch, overlooking rice fields and to the looming karsts beyond. There was a path of beautiful flowers of bright colours leading up to my bungalow, always with many butterflies flying around them, so that when I walked along the path, the butterflies all flew up from the flowers and I was walking through clouds of butterflies! It was glorious. And the air was so clean, and all the green trees... mmm, I actually felt green just being there. It's obviously a very difficult feeling to describe, but the place was so lush, the air clean, and so many great trees, I felt green (i.e. the colour, not the political meaning).

In Vang Vieng, you can go tubing down the river - floating down in huge inflated tyres - with occasional stops to jump off things, and drink Lao beer. I found this all a bit odd - the tubing took a LONG time as the river wasn't running very fast, and I think I'd have found it a bit boring by the end. As for the bizarre fascination with jumping off things... sometimes you can see that locals have taken a farang (white foreigner) idea and RAN WITH IT, so that you get this bizarre inter-cultural fusion. All along the river, there are little platforms - ranging from 5m - 10m high - where you can stop, have a beer or a Pepsi, and then jump off the platform into the river. That's it. But it's one of the things you do as you go tubing down the river. I guess the tubing itself is so slow, that jumping off platforms is needed to liven up the experience. I didn't do this as I have a fear of jumping into water when I can't see the bottom. I was also highly disapproving of the extremely drunk people who did do this.

I, instead, kayaked down the river which was so cool. I love kayaking. It's so wonderful to go floating down a beautiful, peaceful river, with mountain karsts around you, clouds of butterflies, a cute guide in the back with whom I could practice my Thai (the Thai and Lao languages are very close), the occasional rapid (small at this time of year, but I was assured that they become very big and dangerous once the rainy season has really got going) and the feeling of working out my muscles. I kayaked twice, both for about four hours and was very sore afterwards, but in a blissed out way. Yay for Vang Vieng.

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