We arrived in Vang Vieng lateish on a Friday night. After checking into our guesthouse and getting showered I had a mini breakdown. I think it was the cumulation of a couple of weeks of being tired, being ill and some pretty stressful situations catching up with me but I turned into a complete little girl and had a bit of a moan. It was the first time I think things properly caught up with me and I was missing a few things from home, my bed in particular. Better out than in I suppose, we got an early night and the next morning I felt completely revitalised. Good job, because tubing was the plan for the day.
For those that don't know, tubing basically involves hiring out an inflatable tractor tyre inner tube, beign driven 3.5km upstream and floating down the Nam Khong River back into town. Sounds fine, but there is a caveat. The river is lined with bars, concentrated heavily at the drop off point, all trying to feed you free shots of Laos whiskey to get you hammered, then there are the ropeswings, jumps and slides (one is called the 'Slide of Death', the name can be taken literally, people have died on it). For months my sister has been telling me that certain death will follow if I go tubing, even if I stay off the alcohol. As we got on the tuk-tuk up to th drop off point we also found out someone died on the river the day previous - though this was apparently because he'd had a mushroom shake which contained some mushrooms of the not so magical variety. Still, there we were - what could possibly go wrong?
Well, we made it out alive - which is nice. It wasn't all smooth sailing though. We stayed at the bars at the top of the river for alot longer than was planned, a few buckets were consumed (despite me previously vowing not to touch them anymore). Seriously though, no more buckets for me now - they put some bad shit in the red bull and it leaves my brain fried for a couple of days afterwards - not good, but I digress. When we set off down the river with the intention of getting back to town it started to rain, hard. By this point the bars had thinned out and it got a little hairy, we decided to get out the river pretty pronto - which I think was a good idea. We waited the rain out (only lasted about ten minutes) and then got back into the river, not wanting to pay for a tuk-tuk back to town. We floated for a little while longer until the sun had pretty much set and it started to get dark, at this point we decided the tuk-tuk fare was probably the lesser of two evils and got out of the river properly.
All in all we had alot of fun tubing. To be honest, for me, it was largely down to the group that we went with. I'm probably going to come across really old and boring but the aim of the game pretty much seems to be to go and get smashed, rather than the tubing part, which isn't really what i'm here to do. It's not even as if it's a great party - the music is pretty shitty, and there are alot of (for want of a better word) twats that seem to gravitate around places like that. It reminded me a fair bit of the old atletics union nights at uni - and anyone who went to uni with me probably knows I hated them with a passion. Still, for the one day we had a lot of fun - but my favourite bit was actually the tubing, which apparently makes me a bit of a nerd according to tubing culture.
We met one guy on the tuk-tuk up the river who had been in Vang Vieng for two months, only one day of which he hadn't been tubing. The most ridiculous part is that he hadn't once hired out the tube, instead just got a tuk-tuk up to the bars, got smashed, and got a tuk-tuk back. Seems like a complete waste of time to me, to each their own though I guess. Still, I'll take a night at Womb in Tokyo over this kind of crap anyday of the week!
We parted ways with our group the following day when we decided to get out of Vang Vieng and head down to Vientiane - one day of tubing was enough for us. Vang Vieng is very much a town that has sold it's soul to tourism. Most of the bars are showing endless repeats of Friends or Family Guy, drugs are everywhere, and there seems to be very little of Laos culture left in the town. In it's defence the backdrop to the town is a stunning set of limestone cliffs, it's pretty spectacular - which is presumably why it became so popular in the first place.
We didn't take the camera tubing for obvious reasons but somebody in our group had a waterproof camera with them so I will post pictures later once she uploads them. Here are a few we did take.
Good remix!
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