Vang Vieng (21/4/12 - 24/4/12)

Everybody who goes to Laos tends to spend a bit of time in Vang Vieng doing something called Tubing so naturally we decided to give it a go. In case you don't know what 'tubing' is, it basically involves sitting in a rubber ring and floating down a river. You are then pulled into different riverside bars which include slides, zip lines and swings. Something which I am sure would not be allowed in any part of the world apart from SE Asia! It has often made headlines across the world due to the amount of people who have been injured and even killed whilst tubing, usually due to taking the readily available choice of drugs and over doing it on alcohol.

We arrived in late afternoon so we just had a little look around and then got an early night ready for the day ahead. Vang Vieng was a funny place, it kind of weirdly reminded us of Franz Joseph in New Zealand, but a lot bigger. Also, every single bar or restaurant shows different episodes of Family Guy or Friends so it was nice to chill out and relax in the evening watching that.

Our actual day of Tubing was a cracking day even though we didn't really 'Tube' that much! We met a couple of Norwegian lads that had been on our bus from Vientiene and started the day off with them although we met a lot more people as the day went on. In all honesty, we probably had a little bit too much to drink, (especially when you are playing around in water), but our parents will be pleased to know that we didn't take any drugs, although I can't say the same for some of the people around us! During the dry season it doesn't get as busy as in the wet season so we only really spent our time in the first few bars jumping off zip lines, going down slides, skipping and also partaking in some limboing (I am not even sure if that is a real word). I also managed to get painted with a lot of purple stars, I later found out that the paint they use is car paint so this was a bit of a shock! We ended up having to get a tuk tuk back to the centre of town with out tubes as it got too dark to carry on, so we dropped off our tubes and then spent the night in one of the bars with a group of people that we had met during the day. Some of the people that we met were doing five or six days tubing, but I am pretty positive that by the end of the six days, their body would have been completely broken!

We spent the whole of the next day in bed although I did wake up rather early in the morning thinking it would be a good idea to go and do it again, until I then woke up a few hours later to discover that I didn't feel quite as peachy as I thought I had! Bit of a waste of a day really, although we did make it to one of the bars to sit through a couple of episodes of Friends. That was about as active as we got!

This was the lower part of the river so the water looks pretty horrid but further upstream it was actually a lot cleaner! Unfortunately we do not have any photos of us actually tubing as we didn't want to take our camera with us! 

Vang Vieng itself was a really nice place, so long as you don't go there expecting traditional Lao culture!