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Published: February 7th 2008
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The drive to Vang Vieng was really beautiful. Had the road been straight the trip probably would have taken about an hour. The scenery was really nice, the beautiful hills, the little villages with their AusAID/UNICEF water tanks and the truck which had crashed into the side of the mountain squashing the entire cabin...
Vang Vieng is quite possibly the weirdest place we have visited so far. The main street is lined with restaurants with couches and cushions rather than seats so that you are nice and comfortable while watching countless episodes of Friends/Family Guy/The Simpson's and smoking/eating pretty much whatever drug you want from their happy menu.
The day that we arrived it was pretty cold and foggy so we didn't really do anything. You couldn't even see the beautiful limestone mountains which surround the village as the fog was so thick. We met a guy from Belgium and together decided that for dinner we would have to go totally cheesy and grab ourselves a couch in one of the many restaurants. The menu's arrived - the normal menu and the 'special' menu. Although we had both heard that this happens in Vang Vieng, we didn't really expect
it to be so blatantly obvious. We ordered off the normal menu and actually had quite a decent meal. After dinner we headed back to our hotel to watch a DVD which was quite a novelty as we hadn't watched a movie since we left Australia.
The next day, as it was still pretty cool, the three of us decided to hire scooters so that we could visit some of the caves near the town. This was..interesting as neither of us had ridden a scooter before. Scott got the hang of it (at least enough for me to feel brave enough to hop on the back) and the three of us set off for the caves. We visited two caves, both were really long. The first one was much prettier inside, with lots of stalactites and stalagmites. The second was not as exciting to look at, but still cool.
That night the three of us chose one of the few restaurants without couches to eat at. About 2hours after we ordered our food turned up...hmm. The food really wasn't that fantastic either and the serves were quite small. Quite annoying.
Our last day in Vang Vieng was
nice and sunny, so like the 350+ other people we decided to go tubing. Tubing basically involves floating down the river on the inner tube of a tyre. Along the river there are heaps of bars offering free lao lao and swings for you to jump into the river from. We decided to bypass these bars but it still took us about 3.5hours to float the whole way. Tubing was heaps of fun and really relaxing. Towards the end of the river we nearly crashed into water buffalo!
That night we went to the bar out the back of our hotel. The bar was run by a bunch of young semi-expats who had been in Vang Vieng between a month to 6months at a time. It didn't really seem like it would be all that profitable, but it was fun. We spent the night chatting to various other travellers (including the bar staff) and playing card/dice games which was cool. They all invited us to go tubing the following day, which we had to decline as we were catching a mini-bus to Vientiane.
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