Motorbikes and Extreme Tubing in Vang Vieng

Its hard to describe Vang Vieng but I’ll give it a go. Its a small town 5 hours south of Luang Prabang built up on the banks of the Mekong river. It was first famous for its really beautiful setting with its huge limestone cliffs and caves, but now its more famous for the tubing that goes on down the river. Its attracted loads of backpackers to the area so its like a section of the Khao San road has been transplanted over to this tiny town in Laos. Its not just normal tubing however, the river’s lined with bars and as you float past kids throw ropes out to you and pull you in to sell you buckets of vodka redbull, so absolutely everyone on the river is completely drunk. Its a bit surreal as come 6 o'clock the town is filled with people in their bikinis stumbling round the town on their way home. We watched with disdain the first day but sure enough a few days later and that was us!!

Our first day in Vang Vieng was meant to be the grand tubing adventure but a few of us were still feeling ill so we decided to postpone and hired some scooters to visit the surrounding countryside .This turned out to be a great day, cruising along in the valley of the enormous mountains stopping to explore caves and swim in the blue lagoon. We decided not to get a guide for the caves which may sound a bit dangerous but it was great being able to explore by ourselves, not knowing what we’d come across. At one point we found a completely isolated chamber and all turned our headtorches off, the darkness and quietness was so intense (until Dan tried to jump on me).

Finding a reclining Budha in the middle of a cave

Daylight, at last!

On the way back home however we missed our turning, despite my marvelous map reading skills, and ended up going the very long way round. This would have been fine but then Lukas’ bike broke, it just wouldn't start, some friendly locals stopped to try to help us but no luck. It was getting dark now and we didn't want to leave Lukas in the middle of no where by himself while we went to get help so we pushed the bike to the nearest village and tried to explain what had happened.

This was quite an amusing site – the only westerners around, and completely caked in orange dust from riding on the dirt tracks all day, like we’d been the victims of really bad spray tans. It was also really hard work as no one spoke any English at all, and the helpful phrases in the back of Lonely Planet didn't really deal with this situation. Eventually we were saved when a young girl who’d learned English at school explained t her parents that we needed to use their truck to get the bike back to town, phew.

5 minute cow delay

The next day we were ready for tubing! We set off from out hostel wearing just our swimming stuff and with nothing more than some money sealed in a plastic bag and met up with Mike, another friend from SpicyThai. We got to he first bar and broke ourselves in gently with a few beers before starting down the river. All around there were these obscenely high rope swings held up by not very sturdy bamboo stilts and operated by Laos school children. The type of thing you immediately know there's no way you're going to do it, we all looked at them in disbelief and vowed we wouldn't do them. After a leisurely float down the river we got pulled out at bar no. 2 – it was 2pm now which we decided was late enough for a bucket and a drinking game, and suddenly the highest swings didn't seem that high any more! We continued on like this for a while - float, drink, float, drink and by the last bar everyone was loving the death rides. How silly we were to be so scared at first we thought.

Well, it turned out we weren't actually that sillyto be hesitant, it took until the alcohol had worn off the next morning for us to realise our injuries, we all felt a bit worse for wear. An had purple bruises all down her back (a week later when she was back in Bangkok she went to the hospital and found out she’d fractured two of her ribs) and Dan and I both thought we had minor concussion, mine from a rather spectacular face plant coming off a water slide. One day was definitely enough for us!

Unfortunately there’s no pictures at all of this day as no one had a waterproof camera, which makes it into even more of a surreal place for me, it really has to be seen to be believed. Here’s a link though to give you a bit of an idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysU28U6_rrE

We’d planned to kayak down to the capital Vientiane the following day as a change from getting the bus but given the state of us we decided against it! Vientiane didn't seem that special after the rest of Laos that we’d seen. Luang Prabang was beautiful with its french colonial buildings, Vang Vieng was just crazy, and Vientiane seemed a bit dull in comparison. We only stayed for two nights, one of them was An’s birthday so we treated ourselves to a posh french restaurant. Fillet steak was £5 which was three times what we’d normally spend on dinner but then we thought what we’d pay for it at home! I also had a glass of wine for the first time since we left England MMMMMMNN!