After a 6 hour minivan ride over some serious hills and with our driver doing his absolute best to hit every pot hole on the way (we were lifted clear off our seats several times) we arrived in Vang Vieng town. We were disappointed.
The town is pretty much one road littered with guest houses and restaurants/bars. We wandered the streets trying to find where all the action was before picking a guest house. Later that evening we went out exploring and our spirits soared as we found that everyone goes down by the river to a bar called "Bucket Bar" - where as the name suggests their specialty is small plastic buckets filled with a combination of Laos Whiskey, soft drink and red bull - a potentially disastrous combination.
Up early the next morning we set out to go tubing. Tubing means you hop on a tuk tuk which takes you up river and drops you off with an inner truck tube. You then float down the river - this sounds relaxing but not exactly fun - so it's a good thing that every 50metres there's a different bar setup where they pull you in for a drink.
Having a drink and tubing sounds good but it gets better. Every bar has at least one adrenalin based activity - rope swings, flying foxes, trapezes, mud pits or water slides. As you can probably imagine a river full of young people drinking in the sun and doing some extreme activities was a lot of fun. You have to be back before 6pm if you want your deposit back so we took it pretty easy and got back just in time.
All in all we stayed for 5 nights and really enjoyed the place. The town is one dimensional and we were glad when it came time to move on. We will put photos up the next time we're on the computers.
Highlights
- Watching other people get slammed on the high swings - belly flops galore! For example two aussie boys who were not content with the degree of difficulty of the swings etc so they did everything blind folded.
- Mud wrestling, very dirty but very fun. In the mud throwing fights there is power in numbers so pick one person and get everyone else to pelt them.
- Going to a Laos disco (nightclub) with some local Laos. Instantly we were transformed into C grade celebrities like actors off of Shortland Street
- New Zealand sport. The AB's winning as expected and the Kiwis with their unexpected World Cup victory. The Australian that told us instantly regretted it.
Random Fact: Several of the cafe's in Vang Vieng have TV's constantly playing back to back episodes of Friends. Good for 30 minutes or so when you're feeling the effects of tubing but some people sit in there all day - not exactly our kind of traveling.
Lessons Learned
- The distance from the last bar on the river to the tubing depot is truly massive - over an hour. Leave the last bar well before 5pm.
- Some of the bars have code words (e.g. number 420) which they advertise over the speaker early in the evening. If the code word is read aloud later in the evening, i.e. when the bar is breaking the curfew, it means the police have arrived.
- We both have fickle NZ accents. Too much time with others and our accents start to noticabley change - gross.
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