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It appears I didn't really contact my family for about a week at this part of the trip, so this part is from memory, not Facebook...
Having arrived in Vang Vieng I sorted myself out in a hostel and had a relaxing afternoon. It's really quite a strange place! The streets are lined with restaurants and bars, all of which have Family Guy or Friends running 24/7 on big screens at the front with comfy bed-seats positioned all over - you order a drink, settle down and watch some tv! It's very strange, but also quite nice to have a homely comfort in such an unexpected place.
After a fun night at the bars, we woke up (fairly) early the next morning to go tubing. It is no longer the experience it once was - up until last year, it was drug and drink fuelled, with 23 bars lining the river, and numerous slides, ropeswings and jumps from trees over water far too shallow to be safe. Last November, the police decided that the huge number of tourist injuries and fatalities (seriously) was not giving their country the greatest reputation - they closed down all but 3 of the bars, cracked down on the drugs and smashed up all the dangerous wooden slides etc. What it is now is actually a really pleasant romp down the river in a tractor inner tube with a beer in hand, nice and chilled out, with a couple of stops off at bars (where beer pong and other games get very lively), followed by a mad dash in the final hour when you realise you haven't left yourself enough time to get back by the 6pm curfew where you can get the deposit back on the tube. Great fun, especially with a big group of people, who congregate at bars and go down en masse. We crawled to bed early, shattered, tipsy, and a little burnt.
The next morning, I hired a mountain bike with another guy in my dorm, and we headed off to find the caves and do the 7km cycle to Blue Lagoon. Caving was a real experience - there are about 15/20 different locations, so you just pick one and go for it. After cycling down a dirt track for about 15minutes we reached what was, evidently, the house of a Laos woman who was making some serious money off a couple of deep caves she had found in the cliffs in her back garden. Wesqueezed through tiny gaps, on hands and knees, and explored deep into the caves (always watching where we put our hands - spiders the size of your face all over the walls). There is one cave which you follow, darker and darker, narrower and narrower, until eventually you reach a pitch black pool of water, deeper than you can see, which you can climb into and have an eerie swim...
We spent the afternoon at the blue lagoon, an awesome clear blue river with a tree hanging over it, with 2 natural jumping off branches and a couple of rope swings. After many failed attempts at achieving a backflip from a rope swing, I cycled back and headed to Vientiane, the capital, 4 hours away. I decided I wanted to kind of 'hitch it' - there was a local pickup truck going, so I hailed that down and climbed in. We drove through a massive storm, being battered by rain on all sides, which was really quite fun. When it dropped us miles outside of town, it was a case of thumbing down a local bus for 20p (rather than take an extortionate tuktuk).
Vientiane itself was really only a one night stop off, but a very cool place to see. It definitiely felt like where the rich Laos go - you saw them having a coffee in a chic bakery and a glass of wine at night, which you definitely didn't get anywhere else. My nicest hostel yet - aircon! A VERY French feel, you get the impression it would be a really great place to go as a wealthy holiday-goer - taking in the atmosphere, the lovely food and drink - but maybe not a real backpacker destination, especially as there isn't much to 'do'. Perfect place to go for a day, and had a good day out on some hired bikes seeing the sights, including an ugly replica of the Arc de Triomphe, installed by the modest French. Flight to Hong Kong on the 21st from Bangkok..
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