Vang Vieng - Home of Tubing

---

After a 22 hour bus ride to Laos' capital Vienitene, we decided to spend the night here and hit the bars due to the fact it was my birthday. We had heard Vientiene was a relatively quiet place and soon discovered this was true as we were turfed from a local bar (where we witnessed a very high standard pool tournament) at 1.30am! We were really tired from the long travel though so we decided to go to bed and travel to Vang Vieng the next day.

We made ourselves at home in Vang Vieng and soon realised not only was this the home of tubing (an extremely fun water sport which involved rubber tubes, giant slides and the local dirty river not to mention plenty of alcohol), but it was also the home of lost hippies and people who liked to sit round all day watching Friends and Family Guy in restaurants (something which we would do from time to time!)

We'd spend our days either going to the local swimming pool or tubing and then we'd spend our nights in one of the bars in which we found the local equivalent of Baa Bar (Q Bar). If the weather weren't too great we'd go to one of the local 'Happy Bars' in which we'd try the local delicacies like 'Happy Shakes' or 'Happy Pizza'.

TUBING: We ended up going tubing 3 times during our stay in Vang Vieng. The first time we got so rotten that we didn't really end up doing that much of the water sports and only managed to make our way to the 4th bar (about half way). So the second time we made sure we did a lot more which involved robbing someone's tube due to the extortionate prices of the tubes and also plenty of water activities such as diving from a giant diving board and a slide nicknamed the 'death slide' amongst others.

As well as tubing Vang Vieng happened to be filled with some of the cutest puppies on earth! Our guest house had a small puppy named Panda who we kidnapped one night and took to our room! He hated us at first but soon grew a bonding with us and by the time we left Vang Vieng we found ourselves missing the little tyke.

Vang Vieng is a party type of place for Westerners which makes a lot of money for Laos (a still very much developing country) by catering to our needs. Definitely worth the visit though!

---