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Happy Hour!
For us, it's been "happy hour" for 4 months now! Sometimes, we feel old. Or rather, not so much old as "not as young". It becomes more and more apparent when we sustain injuries (like from landing in water from great heights at odd angles or perhaps from over-indulging in alcohol) and then try to recover quickly. When you're nineteen, for instance, and you launch yourself off of a forty foot platform to swing gracefully over a river, releasing high in the air to come crashing down into a fast flowing river while totally drunk you could probably recover from that with a mere shake of the head and another long swig of beer. When you're pushing 31, however, it turns out these sorts of activities take a ... deeper toll.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. I'll explain all that stuff above in a minute. First, though, Vietnam, which we've left, deserves a few final thoughts.
If you peek at a map of Vietnam, you'll surely notice how oddly shaped it is. It's really long and stretched out with two larger areas on each end. Turns out, this strange geography combined with the convoluted history of the place (always trying to fend off foreign bullies like the
Chinese, Siamese, or French) make for two apparently distinct Vietnamese. So much so, in fact, that when Lynn and I asked a fellow bus riding Vietnamese missionary woman from the South about how she liked living in the North, well, she made it clear that she very much preferred her home in Saigon to the cutthroat attitude of Hanoi. This distinction is often reinforced by the reports you get from fellow backpackers who tell their tales of being royally ripped off by northern Vietnamese tour operators, bus drivers, and hotel staff. The constant threat of vast and debilitating over-charging, the horror stories of bus drivers stranding tourists at border unless they pay a second fee, and so on apparently are almost entirely from the north. Which is a horrid shame, really, because it was our last impression of Vietnam.
Anyway, we got lucky. We did manage to escape the north without getting totally done over. It's almost impressive to watch just how calculating and shameless the tour operators can be when trying to nickle and dime tourists. In one transaction with our hotel woman where we tried to purchase Laos visas, a night's accommodation, a two day Halong Bay
tour, and bus tickets for our Hanoi to Vientiane journey, she tried no less than half a dozen times to scam us. If it wasn't the prices for the items themselves, it was the service charge from the embassy, or the credit card fee, or the exchange rate from dollars to dong, or ... you get the idea. It's exhausting and if it weren't for the fact that we're post-India the whole thing may have soured our opinion of Vietnam. Luckily, since we did have our Hindu-tourist-tout-armor-of-invincibility we did quite well and had a great time. Thanks India, we owe you one! And while we did really love Vietnam with it's incredible food, amazing scenery, and generally lovely culture, we were more than a little relieved when we realized we'd crossed out of Vietnam and into Laos without being kicked off, or ripped off, or just robbed.
Oh, and if the pictures don't do it justice, it should be said that Halong Bay is one of the prettiest places on earth. Our two day cruise through the islands (limestone karst formations with that Chinese painting look) on a luxury junk was amazing. We did a couple of neat-o caves,
Giant tortoise
These guys apparently used to live in the lake, but none have been spotted for several years now :( some kayaking, and the requisite dive off the top of the 30 foot junk swim in the cool waters of the bay. Really nice.
A mere twenty hour overnight bus later (ouch) and we were finally in Laos! Vientiane, despite all the nay sayers we'd run into, is actually quite nice and positively dead for a capitol city. We loved the quiet pace, the relative lack of motorized vehicular death, and the plethora of yummy cafes and eateries. There's absolutely nothing to do there, however, so we hopped onto another bus up to Vang Vieng the next day and ... accidentally happened on the Land of the Lotus Eaters.
Vang Vieng is ... nuts? Ridiculous? Unsafe? Entirely inebriated? Total debauchery? All correct.
To paint a brief picture, this once sleepy fishing village located between Vientiane and Luang Prabang is famous for ... tubing. What is tubing, you ask? It's the absurd past time of renting an inner tube and floating down a river. Sounds pretty chill until you factor in the dozen or so bars set up on the river that are designed to do two things: 1) get you drunk on cheap booze, and 2) cause
you varying amounts of physical injury via one of their many entirely unsafe adult-sized water-contraptions. Incidentally, "drunk" here is a euphemism for anything up to and including magic mushroom milkshakes and opium. Let's mince words here, though, we're talking about a forty foot human swing into a swift flowing river with jagged rocks hidden beneath (I touched down on the river bed twice ...). There's also an equally high water slide with obvious launching ramp at it's end, several zip lines designed to flip you end over end in an inglorious 540 should you be so retarded as to hit the rubber stopper, and a series of mud pits where you can frolic drunk and get half (or fully) naked with two dozen total strangers.
And before you all think to yourselves, "Oh Derek/Lynn, how bad could it really be?" At least half a dozen people have died here. One Canadian woman actually tried to surf off the waterslide only to slip at the end and crack her head open. There are other stories (and we believe them all because it's so bloody apparent how dangerous this stuff is), but we don't need to immortalize them here. If you
ride the contraptions correctly, you "should" survive unscathed. But there are no instructions and you are, of course, getting steadily more bombed out of your skull as the day splashes along. This stuff wouldn't be safe for sober people let alone the masses of drunken idiots (of which we will include ourselves) who decide "Oh, swinging of THAT ought to be fun!"
Anyway, we're calling it the Land of the Lotus eaters because of the many MANY foreigners who just end up stuck here, seduced entirely by the carefree drunken revelry that can destroy a year of your life in the bat of an eye. Of dubious distinction is a Canadian named Trent who has by all accounts been tubing for 170 straight days by his count. He left his life in the oil sands of northern Alberta for ... good times? Insanity? Genius? All are fitting.
And why "Buckets are Bad News Bears"? Any of you who've been to Thailand know and I know they do buckets of booze in several places around the world, but Vang Vieng is the only place I know of where you can get a quarter bottle of vodka dropped into a
Halong Bay
The start of our overnight cruise bucket with a full bottle of red bull (the real Thai stuff mind you) and some sprite for $1.25 CAN. Needless to say, Lynn and I spent this morning recovering in Vang Vieng proper, which, incidentally, is a vastly more drunken version of Pokhara, Nepal ( meaning it's essentially a few streets of totally tourist dedicated shops, bars, and restaurants designed to accommodate our every need).
Have we mentioned the Friends bars? Damn. Okay, right, well, Vang Vieng is also notorious for it's television bars where they run literally endless episodes of Friends, Simpsons, or Family Guy while ... yup, you guessed it! Get wasted all day and all night (usually recovering from a dozen or more river related injuries).
Look, I hate to say it, but we love it here. It's totally shameful and we are aware how much this may be costing the Laotians in terms of pride or culture, but it's SO much fun. My whole body hurts from landing in the water wrong a couple of times and Lynn feels like a tractor ran her over because of her combination cold-hangover, but yesterday was worth it. This afternoon? Tomorrow? We'll do it all over
again.
This is traveling at it's ... lowest? Highest? Weirdest? All good.
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