Tubing

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This morning I went out to try to find a sandwich for breakfast and the two closest places didn’t have sandwi ches, but the woman in the second place told me they had them at Kangaroo. Another woman offered to take me there on the back of her motorbike, so I hopped on and away we went! It was a short ride, but I thanked her and quickly went in to place my order of one chicken sandwich and one ham sandwich. I was going to buy beer, but it was cheaper at my guest house, so I decided to wait on that one.

After breakfast we slowly made our way back over to the central part of the town (Jammee guest house is on the quiet, southern side) to try to find the tubes. This actually took us a while to find and around 14:30 we finally were on our way. Backing up a bit, across from the tube rentals there is a line of women selling their glorious food, so we bought a club sandwich to split and while she was making it Ronald went to the ATM. The tubes cost 115,000 a person basically, and if you come back before 18:00 you get your 60,000 deposit back. We signed in our information and they wrote on our hands, we were numbers 97 and 98, so we should have seen that as a sign, but moving on…
We were taken by tuk tuk to a middle bridge – apparently the river is too low to start at the beginning. We bought a beer and then headed towards the water. We had just gotten in when we were stopped by a man in the nearby bar…we stopped to sit at the tables and chairs that were in the water – so fun! – and got a rum bucket there for 60,000.

There weren’t many people tubing that day, so we were not surrounded by too much craziness. We left that bar after about 10 minutes and tubed on to the next one that was called “Last Stop”. We were confused because we had been told that we started at the mid-point , and we didn’t want to get out too early, so we stopped there for a while and played checkers (I won!). There wasn’t much action, so we decided to get back in the tubes and just see where we would end up. We saw a sign that said 2 km to the end, and it was like 17:30, so we had to get a tuk tuk to take us back. Sadness.

After we came back, showered, and headed back into town. We ate at Vangvieng Backpackers (not good, and confusingly located right next to Central Vangvieng Backpackers, a recommended restaurant) where they were showing Friends and then went back home. I was stuffed.

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Photos

restaurant
on the river

tables in the river
so fun!

The first bar
kayakers going by