October 24-29: Vang Vieng, Laos

We arrived in Vang Vieng late at night, a couple hours behind schedule. True to scam form, our bus let us off in a guesthouse parking lot (probably the driver’s brother’s). Because it was late and we didn’t have a map of the town, we decided to ask how much this guesthouse was. It was a reasonable price, and Jeff evaluated the room while I waited downstairs with the baggage. He had some football and baseball games to watch at odd hours of the night, so it was important to him that wherever we stayed had wifi. This place said they did, and that it worked in all of the guestrooms, so Jeff tested out the signal. No signal in the room. The owner said, “Oh, ok well try it downstairs in the lobby.” Jeff tried that, and again, no signal. Looked like someone was fibbing about the amenities! We found a nearby place for me to sit with all of stuff while Jeff went off to find a suitable guesthouse. The one he found, Souk Jai Guesthouse, was a lovely, with big rooms and a good location, and was cheaper than the first one we had looked at.

Vang Vieng is a funny place for two reasons. One, because every guesthouse has an open-air restaurant downstairs which plays reruns of either Family Guy or Friends (and seriously, EVERY place…ONLY these shows…). Two, it has become so tourist friendly because of the tubing that the streets are lined with sandwich-making carts and every restaurant serves pizza and American style breakfasts. Now, what is tubing, you may ask? Tubing is the main attraction of Vang Vieng. The town has a small river running through it, the Nam Song. Tourists rent giant inner tubes and catch a tuk tuk (auto rickshaw) upriver to a certain starting point, where there are two loud, spring break-style bars, competing for customers. The bars hand out bandanas and free shots of Lao whisky (ugh), and have water slides and rope swings into the river. Once you are done at these bars, you hop into your tube and float down the river a couple minutes until you arrive at the next bar, where employees throw you a plastic bottle attached to a rope, and they reel you in. The process repeats itself until it gets too dark and everyone has floated down the river back to the center of Vang Vieng. There are about 15 or so bars, but it’s impossible to go to every one.

Our first day tubing, Jeff and I shared the tuk tuk upriver with a group of mainly British people who had traveled together through Southern China on a tour. They were super friendly and we tagged along with them, having a great time. Jeff went off a few of the slides and rope swings (which look totally safe, by the way….not), but I was too much of a wiener to do it too. One of the bars had mud volleyball and boy, was it disgusting! Everyone was throwing handfuls of mud at each other, slipping, and tackling other people, but it was all in good fun. These people we were hanging out with were keeping a bit ahead of the rest of the group of tubers, so we missed out a little on some of the action and cut our tubing time short because we were unsure of where the end was. All in all, it was a crazy fun day, but we wanted to give it another shot since we knew what we would be doing the second time around.

The following day we hired a guide to take us on a trek of the surrounding mountains out to a secluded waterfall. The trek was gorgeous. The scenery is just amazing, with limestone cliffs coming out of nowhere. The hike itself was a bit arduous, very sweaty, and rather slippery. Jeff and I both slipped a couple times during a small river crossing (those rocks are slippery!), but luckily we didn’t get hurt at all. The waterfall was beautiful, and definitely secluded. We didn’t see any other westerners our whole trek out there! Jeff and I swam in the chilly water while our guide totally roughed it and barbecued us some chicken skewers for lunch over a wood fire! It was delicious and very impressive. The walk back was a little less fun, due to tons of prickly bushes whose thorns constantly got caught in our skin, and insanely thick, slippery, unavoidable mud. Oh, the guide has also forgotten a set of keys he needed to open a gate on a bridge, and suggested we hang onto the side of the bridge while we swung our legs around the gate. Um, SO dangerous! The river was beyond shallow if we were to fall. Jeff and I decided not to risk it, and to make an extreme river crossing instead. We were definitely tuckered out at the end of the day, but the trek was a lot of fun. There is so much beautiful scenery in that part of Laos.


Terrifying bridge



We pushed our schedule back by a day so we could give tubing another shot. This time we shared the tuk tuk with two English girls and an Australian girl. They were all super sweet and were nice enough to take our pictures (we didn’t bring our camera because we didn’t want it getting lost or ruined, haha), even though we forgot to exchange information! Grr! Oh well, those pictures of us are lost forever. We took our time more slowly than the previous day of tubing, and a lot of fun chatting with other travelers who had come from places that we were going to visit in the near future. Towards sunset, though, things got a little weird. People began the quickly leave the bars, heading for home. I heard someone mention keeping your tube with you (normally you just leave it before you go into a bar, and just take any one when you leave) so no one could take it. It made sense to be cautious, so I grabbed up the first one I saw. Jeff tried to do the same, but someone got all cranky and said that they were holding on it (along with like, seven others) for their friends. We looked and looked, but couldn’t find an extra one for Jeff! Turns out, lots of people just hire a tuk tuk to take them to starting point, and use other people tubes the whole day, so they don’t have to pay anything to the tube rental companies! So terrible! So Jeff and I saddled up on the one tube I found and, in the dark, slugged back down the river on an overweight tube. Then things REALLY went downhill! We encountered some small rapids, were headed for a sharp branch, and lost our balance. The waterproof pouch I had around my neck, which held the rest of our money, somehow got pulled off my neck and was completely lost. Jeff and I each lost a flip flop trying to regain our balance on the rocky bottom in the strong current. We almost even let loose of our tube! We somehow managed to climb back on, but the situation repeated itself again further down, and we each lost our remaining shoe. The river was dark, quiet, and empty, and we were starting to get pretty worried that we had completely missed our ending point on the river. Thankfully, because we were floating so slowly, a big group of conjoined tubes floated past us, and we latched on. We talked to them the whole way down, and they were from all over the world. We finally made it to the end, jumped off our tubes, trudged through some deep mud barefoot (no leeches, I hope?) and made it back to a familiar road in town! And even better, Jeff found an abandoned tube at the side of the road, no doubt from one of those losers who just hijacked his. This way, we could get our deposits back! Yay! We returned the tubes, got some awesomely delicious sandwiches from one of the street carts (complete with French’s yellow mustard), and hit the hay before leaving the next day on a treacherous mini bus ride to Luang Prabang.


Rice paddy