Vang Vieng, Vientianne and Bangkok again

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The journey to Vang Vieng proved to be quite an ordeal, especially for Ilse. Normally I'm the one who has trouble with travel sickness, but this time it was Ilse's turn. In the end the trip can be summarized as 8 hours of more twist and turns than one can count and the driver running out of plastic bags. Sadly this made her largely oblivious to the beautiful countryside we were passing. Finally after 8 hard hours we arrived at Vang Vieng.

Vang Vieng is quite a small town and mostly overrun by tourists. This is because Vang Vieng is famous for 2 things: tubing and rock climbing. It is the first activity that attracts most visitors. Tubing basically means letting yourself float down a river on an inner tractor tube. This sound pretty relax and it is, as we experienced. The reason why most people do it however, is the vast amounts of bars that can be visited while you float to Vang Vieng. Hence most of the young tourists are here for the beer, weed and party. It shouldn't come as a surprise that it was the second activity me and Ilse were more interested in.

Also we were lucky that the annual Laos boat races were about to take place. Also in Vang Vieng this was a huge festivity with people coming to Vang Vieng from all over the country side. We massively enjoyed this day as the boat races were virtually just in front of our guest house.

The next day we did some rock climbing which we liked very much. I myself had never climbed before but Ilse was quite apt with a vertical surface. Hence, were I did only the first 4 climbs, reaching about 20-25 meters, Ilse made it much higher than that. After Laos we will never been content climbing inside again.

Our last activity in Vang Vieng took us to the next city, Vientianne, the capital city of Laos. A bus took us 1,5 hour to the river were we would kayak a part of the way to Vientianne and jump on a bus again to complete the whole trip.

In short, me and Ilse aren't very good kayaking. Remember my post in Chang mai on the easy rapids. Well, we encountered 2 of those on our little kayak trip and the result: we swam half the distance. we stilled enjoyed it very much though as the scenery was simply amazing.

After this little activity we arrived safely in Vientianne which is a very nice city. Not a lot to do for tourists as it is a very practical city but sometimes this is just what you need during such a long journey. We stayed here for 2 days relaxing for a bit. The only real activity we conducted was searching for the Australian embassy as we wanted to get our working holiday visa before departing to Nepal. Eventually we managed to get it in Bangkok which was our next destination.

The visa process for people of dutch nationality was quite effective as we could apply for it online and got our visa number just 24 hours later. This left us a couple of days to enjoy Bangkok again and on the 10th of October we left for Nepal

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Comments

[anonymous]

where did you travel from to get to vang vieng? me and my friend are looking at going there from bangkok

[Mitrompeta]

Vang vieng
We actually came from the north of laos, from Luang prabang. but from bangkok there should be a bus from chow kit (or mo chit, always confuse those 2) busstation towards Vientianne (captial of laos). From there its only a short busride again to Vang Vieng. Alternatively, green discovery (adventure organization) can arrange you to kayak part of the trip from Vientianne towards Vang vieng.