VANG VIANG

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In the minibus to Vang Viang, we were all pretty squashed. As fourteen of us were squeezed into the back, we all got to know each other quite well quite quickly! Our first impressions of Vang Viang were not that good. The backdrop of the mountains and the river were stunning, but the town itself seemed completely geared towards tourism, a bit cheesy, and felt a bit empty! We were a bit concerned about this and nearly got the next bus out of there!

The following day though, we decided to go tubing. Tubing. The word itself doesn't really give away any clues about what the activity might entail. So many people who we've met so far on our trip have raved about it, and so we decided to give it a go. When we hired the tubes themselves we were numbered with markers like cattle, and then ushered into some waiting vans, which conveyed us to a bar about 20 minutes upstream. On the way there we were sat next to a crazy hyper hyper go go American who was wearing a pink lampshade on his head and comedy glasses. He had “56 days tubing” on his chest in marker pen and spoke at a trillion miles an hour about the joys of tubing. He was a bit intense and reminded me of Macaulay Culkin in the film Party Monster. The bar that we were dropped at had Daft Punk blazing from the speakers, and it was all a bit surreal, we thought we'd been transported to Ibiza! The bar was really busy, and there were people dancing and swinging from ropes into the river. After a while we got into our tubes, and floated downstream for twenty metres, until the next bar scooped us in. We stopped for a team talk and decided that the novel experience was a good one, and here Rob went on some zip slides into the river. After a while here we floated again in our tubes for another ten metres, until we were scooped up by the next bar. Here we were met with a mud slide as well as some more swing ropes. Here we all had a go on everything and it was absolutely amazing! We didn't drink too much, but we could see how it might be dangerous trying these activities blind drunk. We met a couple of people who'd lost their wallets, and a man who'd lost his glasses!

When we decided to float back to town on our inner tubes, the sun was setting, and trip down the river for the last hour was really peaceful and the views were amazing. It was pretty good to feel like we were part of the river itself, just floating along. We're not sure who came up with the idea of tubing, but we were really pleasantly surprised at how amazing it was.

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