Day 10 - Vang Vieng

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Today was a free day to do with it what we pleased. We went down for breakfast at about 9:15am where we met up with Emma and Sophie. We decided to start the day with tubing. It’s something you have to do if you come to Vang Vieng.
We went to the tube hire place, they threw our tubes on the back of a tuk tuk and we were on our way to the starting line. Here we were greeted by two guys who tied 'tubing' bandana things on our wrists and said "here, have a free shot of Laos Whiskey". We thought 'hey why not?', so took our shots and the day had begun. We then made our way across the bridge to the first bar of the 1km stretch. We had a drink, sat there for a bit then got in our tube and headed down the river.
If you wanted to get off at any of the bars on the way you could either paddle or one of the staff from the bar would throw a rope out to you and pull you over.
We stopped at a few bars on the way then as it was still early we decided to keep floating down the river. Most people get off after the end of the 1km stretch of bars. We were on the river for over 3 hours as there was a good 2.5kms of river after the end of the bars to the end of the tubing area.
Some patches of the river we really slow and some we really fast. We got to the end and made our way on foot to the hire place to return our tubes and get back our deposit. Then made our way back to the hotel to change out of our wet clothes and made our way back into town for a late lunch. By this time it was already about 3:00pm so we just got some pastries at the bakery that was recommended by Dean. After that, we did some shopping then decided to finish off our relaxing day with an authentic Laos Massage. Well, it was anything but relaxing; it was borderline assault. It did only cost 50,000kip, or about $6.50 and went for 45minutes. We all walked out in paid but was sure we’d feel good for it later.
We made our way back to the hotel for dinner. Tonight for me it was carbonara again. Not as nice as the one at Utopia the other night but it was okay.
We decided against going out tonight and just sat on the balcony for a bit before retiring to bed for our early start in the morning.

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