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We're now in Vang Vieng which is the land of 'tubing', eeeehhh! We've been excited about this since reading about it in a magazine back in Chiang Mai... and it lives up to all expectation!!!
The 4 of us (me, Rich, Rob and Chris) arrived here at around 8pm after the most amazing 5 hour drive south from Luang Prabang - it was like the one we did from Chaing Mai to Pai but better. We were in a minivan which we'd pre-booked from a guest house and we were sooo glad we did - it worked out the same cost as the local bus but after seeing the drive I think the local bus would've been suicide! The whole drive was around the edge of the mountains, through tiny remote Laos villages which were so poor and so far from anywhere or anything, it's unreal to see how these people live. You'll just be driving through thick forested mountains when you pass through a small collection of ramshackled wooden/bamboo huts with a small water pump where people are showering or collecting water, and all this is hundreds of metres up in the hills! People are working on the 'road' too and there are small make-shift tents (a piece of plastic over some sticks!) where these workers must stay overnight, as it's too far fom aywhere to commute, and they couldn't afford to do that anyway. When driving through one of these villages we saw a boy of about 10 come out of his hut with an AK47 on his back!!! I read later that there have been shootings on this route in the past (although not involving tourists, don't worry mum!). We drove up through the clouds and the views were just awesome, if not slightly tainted by the maniac driver who almost ran over several village chickens, dogs, children, etc (which I obviously had something to say about!!!). Amazing experience though, this country is stunning.
After a relatively early night at Tony's (the bargain guest house we found with a drunk receptionist!) we woke up ready for our first tubing adventure! For those who don't know what tubing is, let me explain... it's a massive piss up by a river where each bar has some kind of aparatus on which you can risk your life, such as a swing on a zip line 20 metres above the water, or platforms you can just leap of off, or huge slides, and there's even mud volleyball/wrestling/tug'o'war!!! All on offer when you're hammered too, no health and safety here!!!!! Exciting (or actually quite nerve wracking!). It's quite safe really as long as you use your common sense, but people who don't have died here, one girl just 3 weeks ago actually, and there are loads of people with bandages on various parts of the body. But you can see why because people just get carried away, but we're sensible - again, don't worry mum!
The Scottish girls we met on our trek in Chiang Mai (Karen and Sarah) advised us not to actually take tubes as they need to be retunred by 6pm (which wont happen!) or you get fined 20,000 kip, and that's if you even have a tube to return cuz people steal each others and then you lose your whole 60,000 kip depoit, which is more than a nights accomodation!!! Plus all the bars are within easy swimming distance of each other anyway. So off we went tubing with no tubes... and we're so glad we did, thanks girls! The first bar is about 3km out of town so at about 1pm we got a tuk-tuk there. As soon as we pulled up we could tell it would get messy - free whisky shots everywhere, music, and people swinging into the water all around! After 1 drink for dutch courage, Rich was the first out of our grpup of 5 (we aquired a new gang member on our minivan trip down here, a South African guy called Paul who looks like a small Will Ferrell and does excellent Arnold Schwartzernager impressions, a real find!) to try the swing at the first bar... he had to climb some ricketty wooden steps to a platform about 20 metres high, grab onto a handle bar and jump! He then swung back and forth for a bit before getting the nerve to drop off into the river below, and he bloody loved it! He went on a few times after that a the other boys followed, but I daren't cuz I watched a girl of my height go up and she couln't reach the handle bar and had to come back down the stairs, so it put me off!! On to the next bar... this one had a straight zip line with a bolt at the end - if you were still holding on when the handle bar hit the bolt you were flipped through the air like a rag doll! Excellent to watch! I was the first to try this one, but there was no way I was hitting that bolt so I let go before it hit and just flew into the water from height which was great fun! Rob (the Yank!) decided to hit the bolt and did a full involunatry 360 degree flip through the air which was hilarious! He had no idea where he was when he surfaced!!! Haha! We stayed at the 2nd bar for ages and after just one whisky bucket each we were hammered! We went to the 3rd bar which is practically joined to the 2nd and some guy fell of the edge in front of me so in my drunken state I had to keep him talking and awake whilst somebody held his head still until a boast arrived to ferry him off - I saw him tubing 2 days later, he'd popped his should out of it's socket! After that all I remeber is stealing some tubes (it's the done thing!) and floating down to the 4th bar where the mud volleyball was, then getting a tuk-tuk home! One of my flip flops was lost in the process and is now floating somewhere down the Mekong!!! We had such a good day. And the good thing is about tubing is that the bars close when it gets dark whihc is about 7pm, so you end up going to bed early (unless you have the stamina to go out in the town after) which means you don't feel nearly as bad as you should the following day, yeay! Unfortunately that wasn't the case for me and Rich cuz we woke in the night and his legs had been eaten by something, we're not sure whether it was bed bugs or mosquitos from by the river but there were so many it seemed unlikely to be the latter, but I only had a couple of bites?! We moved rooms the following night just in case.
But wait, Vang vieng isn't just about tubing! One day the 5 of us hired mopeds and drove through the backroads where there are mountains (or Karsts) all around, some of which have caves in them. The scenery was gorgeous, just a few scattered huts here and there amoungst fields and these Karsts, completely away from the tourist scene. We were trying to find an infamous Blue Lagoon which we thought we'd found, then later realised it was the wrong one! It was still nice to have a dip though! We also went into to one of the caves - there are young Laos boys outside the caves with flash lights acting as guides so off we went with them. It was quite a steep climb to the mouth of the cave and then quite a hairy decent down into it, but it was amazing, and really eerie - there were rocks inside which when tapped made instrumental sounds, the Laos boys showed us! After coming out of the cave we sat and watched the sun setting over the fields and mountaisn before making our way back down the hill to our bikes. We then headed back in the town centre, as it was Aussie day we had to go to Aussie Bar and have a burger and a beer cuz we didn't want to be desrespectful!!!
We ended up staing in Vang Vieng for 7 nights and went tubing 3 times, the last time we intended to float the whole way down the river in a tube whihc is highly recommended but we got side-tracked and left the bars too late - me and Rich set off on our own at about 5pm but after and hour we were freezing and there was still another 2 hours floting to go! So we go out in the middle of nowhere (one sign suggested we were in a nature park?!) and just walked for about half an hour untill we found a man with a tuk-tuk! I'm actually a bit disappointed e didn't float the whole way cuz what we did see was stunning - one side of the river had karsts all the way down and in the sun it would've been such a nice trip.
We decided we had to leave the following day before we became the next tubing addicts - there's one gy here whose been tubing 375 times, I don't think he has a liver! It was a hard pull, our guest house had aquired a 3 week old puppy a few days before which me and Rich named Tommy, one of the receptionists owned him and was trying to feed him milk from a bowl but being so young he was struggling, so we bought him a bottle and we were feeding him and having him play in our room, he was gorgeous! The day we left he was eating a bowl of sticky rce with milk with no problem so I 'm confident he'll be fine! Plus we had to leave our little gang, we've been travelling with Rob and Chris for about 3 weeks now so it was really sad to leave them, and our new addition Paul tunred out to be such a good guy and fitted into our group so well, we all had so much fun together tubing, playing cards, drinking, etc and we had some great banter! Rob named me and Rich 'D1ck and Finch' and there was a whole series made up of 'D1ck and Finch's Adventures', i.e. D1ck and Finch go Tubing!!!!! Haha! The good news is that we're all heading to Vietnam so we're gonna arrange to meet up there! But before we get there we'll need to update you on D1ck and Finch's next adventure... stay tuned!!! x
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