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Published: August 12th 2010
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On the road again...
The mountains in Laos really are stunning And now for a long overdue completion of blog entries for my winter break trip to Laos. I still haven’t gotten that stupid disposable camera developed, so there won’t be any water pictures. But I suppose there’s no guarantee that any of those pictures are any good. So here we go…
Saturday, 01/30/10
It was time to get on the road again. We got up early and ate at the cleverly named Craters which was decorated with bomb shells and various other weapons. Then we boarded a van for Vang Vieng. This van wasn’t as plush as the last, but Kim managed to snap up the coveted front seat and I jumped into the very back. It was slightly better than the completely restless trip from Luang Prabang to Phonsovan, but it was still very uncomfortable. Part of the way through the trip I thought my bladder was going to explode and it didn’t look like a pit stop was in my near future so I asked the driver to stop. I had to climb a small hill and pop a squat in some tall grass in full view of some huts across a small dell. Thanks go out
No S curves here
Only backwards Z's to China for teaching me to squat pee like a pro. A bit later we stopped at a restaurant for lunch but it was so unbelievably hot Kim and I didn’t feel much like eating. Our driver, on the other hand, ate a hearty lunch and cooled off with two or three ice cold beers. Fantastic. I suppose it wasn’t as bad as the unforgettable Cliff in Jamaica (Trish, Tom and Chris: y’all know exactly what I’m talking about).
We arrived in one piece around 3pm and shared a tuk tuk with Mark and Lucy into town. We told the driver which hostel we wanted to go to (we didn’t have reservations, but weren’t worried about it) and he took us to a different hostel. He must get commission or something for bringing tourists there. We took a look around, saw that it was nice and reasonably priced, checked in. We switched on the fans in our room and promptly passed out for three hours. We then ventured out for dinner. We had juicy steak, salad, french fries, and delectable pineapple smoothies. We wandered around the town and saw a sign at one restaurant for something called ‘Space Pizza’.
We wondered what it was and why it was so much more expensive. After a short while both Kim and I started feeling really ill. We power walked pinch-butted all the way back to our hostel and took turns running into the bathroom for the rest of the evening. Food poisoning is awesome.
Sunday, 01/31/10
We slept in until 9am and lay in bed until 10. We were both still recovering from the previous night’s sojourn into diarrhealand. We meandered into town and ate breakfast at Z bar which, aside from having adorable waiters, gives 50% of its profits to a local school. We went shopping for sandals and found the inner tube rental place and made a mental note of it for later. I started feeling a bit peaky again so we returned to the hostel around noon thirty. We took a 2 ½ hour nap (hey, we were on vacation!), then donned our swim suits and went tubing. Tubing is the thing to do in Vang Vieng. There are bars all along both sides of the river. If you want to stop at a bar you signal a kid standing along the shore and he’ll throw
Don't eat here!
Unless you enjoy food poisoning a line to you and reel you in. Most of the bars had dangerous looking slides, zip lines, rickety platforms for diving, mud volleyball, and many other activities that go well with copious amounts of alcohol. We got (literally) roped into the first bar we passed. It was really crowded and like something out of an MTV Spring Break TV special. I felt old and out of place. We had one drink then got out of there. We floated down the river past several more bars where people were tumbling down slides and flipping off of zip lines. We stopped at another bar where we sipped white russians and watched a group play mud volleyball. We noticed that at all the bars the menus listed, along with the usual drinks, weed shakes and ‘shroom shakes. Suddenly, the ‘Space Pizza’ sign we saw the day before made sense. We floated along the river until we came to what appeared to be the end of the bars and decided it was time to get out of the water. We returned to our hostel, showered, and then went back out for dinner. We were going to go to a bar to hang out
but we were both tired. We checked our email at an internet café instead then went back to our guesthouse. I was in bed by 10pm. Did I mention I’m old?
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Trish
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Ah yes
Ah yes, our friend cliff. My, the things my towel must have seen!