Advertisement
Published: December 12th 2008
Edit Blog Post
We’ve stayed in Vang Vieng longer than anywhere else besides Ko Chang, and with good reason! We live in a bamboo-thatched cottage, perched on stilts. Our windows’ plain wooden shutters open outward, and through the diamonds of iron latticework, the garden explodes, its lushness tempered by natty stone paths. Flaming blossoms and burgundy hastas lord over the meandering stream, frequented by young hunters with rolled pants and slingshots. Beyond the stream, angular plots of yellow rice dry in the sun, hastily plastered down like a schoolboy’s quiff. Beyond the second plot, the limestone karsts loom. Jagged spindles and blunt-nosed buttes perch side by side, their sheer cliff faces coated with clinging vegetation. These unseemly arranged marriages long ago shoved together by massive shifts in the earth’s plates exude the unblinking majesty of a glacier-regal bulk both imposing and indifferent. The karsts ascend almost straight skyward for hundreds of meters, evoking a sense of a powerful and strange alien planet.
If you follow the round stones that snake through the grass, you enter lawns studded with lantana, long-tailed butterflies and Seussian hanging flowers that resemble fluffy crimson hot dogs. Invariably, no matter the time of day, three or four travelers linger
in the guesthouse’s restaurant to chat with Joe, the guesthouse’s gruffly wry owner. Every town should have a Joe. A grizzled, solid ex-pat from London, Joe speaks with a strange, meandering wizards’ air and never quite looks you in the eye. He waxes cynical about religion, the state, and fluff novels in a muttering growl. He sees me headed for the shower in a towel with my toothbrush and says, ‘Ahh, heading into town,I see…’ Sometimes, he’ll talk for minutes at a time, hands on hips, squinting off at the karsts, and although we technically speak the same language, I can’t make out one word of his argument…but he doesn’t seem to notice, so it’s okay. He is intimately connected to his land and answers our questions about the gargantuan seed pods dangling above our cottage, and explains how to distinguish butterflies’ sex and age and why there’s a picture of a cement factory on the Lao 5,000 kip note.
The guesthouse sits back from a red, rock-strewn road that leads to the river Nam Song. We walk to town by negotiating a series of rickety, narrow footbridges set high over the Nam Song’s many streams. We wander down
the banks of the Nam Song past the three billy goats that graze the scrub brush and the honey-colored cows that lick the rocks for salt. The river is filled with conical-hatted, long-sleeved Lao women, waist deep collecting river moss which they will dry in the sun, pound into a flat sheet with tomato wheels, spices and sesame seeds, and fry. Khai paen is like dried sheets of nori only tastier, and looks very boutiquey, like something one would find displayed on the Barefoot Contessa’s marble countertops.
The longest pedestrian bridge, the one that extends over the Nam Song proper, supports bicycles, motorbikes, and small carts as well. Your feet become accustomed to holes in the floor, and certain areas of the bridge that tilt ominously sideways become another part of your daily commute to town. When the larger traffic passes, you wedge yourself on the side of the bridge and hang onto the long sticks that act as support beams. As we enter town, Vang Vieng’s natural charm crumbles into a dusty heap of half-finished concrete construction, and laolao-soaked, glazed-eyed white kids in bathing suits frequenting ‘Friends’ bars (bars and restaurants that air the sitcom ‘Friends’ 24/7 —the
town boasts several, as well as two ‘Family Guy’ bars and one ‘Simpson’s’ bar). It looks like the Baghdad edition of MTV Spring Break. Vang Vieng discovered that foreigners like to float down the Nam Song in tubes, and that most of them, given an opportunity to drink n’ tube, will do so in spades. The tubing operation runs a brisk business taxiing kids upriver, and before you’ve even entered the water you can hear the bass pounding from the river bars. The upper portion of the tubing route is stuffed with bars boasting cheap drinks, rope swings and water slides and blaring dance music. It’s a pretty bizarre scene to watch screaming, drunk girls in bikinis mug for their friends’ digital cameras only meters away from Lao men in muddy bvds hard at work building the next river fun palace. However, it’s an easy financial boon for the area, and their ‘happy’ menus make swift profits off salivating customers hailing from climbs where recreational drugs are a bit harder to score.
These miniature Senor Frog’s are relatively cheap to build, depend in part on the preservation of the river, and leave the surrounding countryside virtually untouched. Plus, unregulated
Laos, lacking our fun-inhibiting fear of lawsuits, makes a damn fine rope swing! We spent our second to last day in V V with our Canadian friends from the slow boat slamming off water slides and back-flipping at the end of zip lines. The rope swings make these other thrills seem like a lazy game of petang--You climb 70 + feet up rickety wooden stairs to the top where a guy clings ape-like to a still higher pedestal, grins, and hands you a rope connected to a triangular handlebar. You have to streeeeetch on your tippy-toes out over the void to grab the bar, so once you’ve got it, there’s really no turning back. Which is a good thing-the scary part is the tower—once you’re gliding out high over the sparkling water, it’s pure fun. It’s kind of like a flying trapeze except you can let go at the zenith of the swing’s arc and plunge into deep, cool water. As the sun drops behind the mountains, we scurry back to our tubes, hoping to make the 90 minute float back to town before it gets too chilly. As we drift around a bend in the river, Rihanna fades and
the looming karsts regain their glory.
We finished almost every day at "My Friends’ Shop", our favorite little restaurant. This place’s broken plastic chairs, open air seating and lack of Western menu bucks the V V standard and serves excellent Lao food at more than reasonable prices (most dishes are 10,000 kip- roughly $1.10). The restaurant is run by a twelve-year-old with great English and a relaxed, matter-of-fact manner. Patrons consistently smile in disbelief at the prowess and professionalism of this young business man, but to him, as he casually removes a wad of kip the size of a papaya from a hiding place behind the menu on the wall, it’s clearly just another day. I wonder if he goes to school. We have seen a lot of young Lao kids working during school hours, often attempting to hire out their services to carry bags, act as guides for caves, or in retail establishments.
Vang Vieng was so deliciously laid-back. We spent most of our time playing Scrabble on our porch, listening for pomelos (there was a big tree next to our bungalow, and if we scrambled fast enough after hearing the leaves rustle, we could score a
free treat!), and hanging with our Canadian pals. Really, the only thing that forced us to leave was that we only had two weeks left on our Lao visa and more than ½ the country still to see!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.164s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 7; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0973s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Elizabeth
non-member comment
Beautiful!
You make is SO real. Thanks for writing so beautifully -- it sounds amazing. Wish I could do that rope thing into the water -- sounds like so much fun. Merry Christmas! We are headed to Ogunquit today for a long weekend with Sandri family. Cold and windy here. Miss you.