Advertisement
Published: July 18th 2006
Edit Blog Post
The bus journey North to Vang Vieng was absolutely stunning and refreshingly short. It is a tiny town surrounded by huge limestone mountains and, during our stay at least, continually coverred by the mist from the top of those mountains. There is very little to do or see in the town itself and it seems to have been brought to life by the tourist industry as travellers stop for the fantastic scenery. It does, however, have a well developed traveller scene with loads of cafes serving western favourites (including surprisingly good pizza) and showing films/episodes of Friends 24/7.
We spent the first day relaxing and "exploring" the tiny place which took much less time than anticipated. The weather was pretty wet and miserable but the cooler temperature made a nice change and the rain made a good excuse for chilling out watching films.
The next day we went on a kayaking trip down the Mekong. We were dropped off by tuk-tuk further up the river before kayaking down (with the current thankfully). We made a stop after only a short time to visit some caves in the mountains. After a walk through a local village and paddy-fields we arrived
at a cave which we were hoping to tube through (tubing=floating in a giant inner-tube) only to find that the water level was too high for us to access the cave. We carried on to another supposedly dry cave which turned out to be pretty deadly due to it being incredibly slippery.
Armed with a head-mounted torch (complete with extremely heavy battery pack around my neck) I scrambled up to the mouth of the cave and inched my way down into it. Once in the cave the going was a little less treacherous and there was at least some time to look around at the stalagtites and stalagmites and other interesting formations, although staying on my feet was still the priority (with even one of the sure-footed guides falling over). The cave was fairly interesting although nothing I hadn't seen before, however the conditions underfoot meant that I was quite relieved to get out and back down to the riverbank in one piece.
After lunch we set of in our kayaks again this time for a much longer and more gruelling stretch with included short stretches of rapids. The rapids were great fun albeit on the tame side
(not exactly white water) - this didn't prevent me from getting wet though. As Monique and I turned to avoid some rocks at one stretch of rapids we hit a dip side-on and somehow became stuck at an uncomfortable angle on another section or rocks. Looking back I think we could have dislodged ourselves without getting wet, but the helpful guides told us we let ourselves fall out and we stupidly obliged. We were by no means the only ones to take an unexpected dip (others doing it far more spectacularly than us) but I still felt a bit silly and it left us some way behind the others.
By the time we reached our stopping point at one of the riverside bars I was definitely in need of a break. The bar had a huge zipline which dropped you towards the water from about 10m before pulling you back up to the other end where you let go and dropped from a similar height into the water. In theory. In practice, after plucking up the courage, I got as far as the bottom point where I discoverred that I was unable to pull my legs far enough up
to avoid the water and made a spectacularly ungraceful dismount into the water. It was far from the worst attempt we witnessed however.
The remaining shorter trip back to Vang Vieng was a little more relaxed and we took the time to drift and enjoy the spectacular scenery instead of concentrating on keeping up with the group or falling out. Overall it was a really good day and well worth the aches that follwed.
The next day we planned to hire tubes to float down the same stretch of river in a more leisurely fashion and via a few more of the bars. However, we missed the nice weather in the morning and by the time we had eaten breakfast and got ready the heavens opened and it rained for most of the rest of the day. We disappointedly cancelled our plans as it's a long time to drift if you're cold and wet, even with a couple of Beer Laos in you.
After a few pretty relaxing days in the mist and rain we decided to move on further North to Luang Prabang.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 13; qc: 30; dbt: 0.0435s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb