Vang Vieng

Thursday 20th

We were due to depart for Vang Vieng at 9:30am but it was an hour of delays before we finally took off. The trip to Vang Vieng involved alot of mountain driving, meaning ascends and descends combined with lots of twists and turns. The roads were somewhat bumpy aswell.

We arrived around 2pm at a guesthouse car park. We were approached by someone with a guesthouse up the road for 60 000kip so we checked it out and that's where we stayed. We were starving as we only had a bread roll (plain) for breakfast so we had lunch and went for a walk around the main streets. We looked in alot of shops as Kay wanted a sarong, but we didn't find the right one.


Friday 21st

The objective of today was to find out the specifics about tubing, to book our next leg, call home and to write up my blog. We had decided against going to Phonsavan for a couple of reasons. Firstly it would be an eight hour bus ride from Vang Vieng, then we would need another eight hour trip from Phonsavan to Luang Prabang. So effectively we would spend two days on a bus to only spend one proper day in Phonsavan to see the Plain of Jars.


Saturday 22nd

Today was our first day of tubing. Tubing involves floating down the Nam Song river in a tyre like blow up tube, making stops at bars along the way. We got up, had lunch and went to the tubing shop. It's 55 000kip ($6-7) plus a 60 000kip deposit. They then take you along with others up to the tubing launch point around 4km upriver in a tuk tuk. Funnily enough the bulk of the bars were at the launch point or there about. This explains why we see so many people coming back when we're having dinner, yet they don't have tubes with them, meaning they just go up there to drink all day.

First thought was the river is so dirty, it's a reddish brown colour. Not very appealing that's for sure. The riverbed was all stones so trying to get in the tube was hard at first, i fell and cut/bruised my elbow a little bit in the process. Along with the water colour was the fact that the mud was that colour. At the end of the day, Kay had to scrub my boardshorts for me (i asked).

We weren't going to stop off for a drink so soon but when there was a sign saying 'only three bars left', we decided to stop. The section before this bar was very shallow so we had to walk along the rocks to get there. Alot of the locals were looking at me, i think because of my white skin. I almost lost my thongs in this part, not the first time. I was lucky that one of them got stuck on a pole and didn't go down the river. We didn't really want to drink so we just shared a vodka bucket and had a shot of liquor with bees inside it.

We had to walk down the river til we got to deep enough water then we took off properly. As we were passing our unopened bottle of water, 'we' dropped it in the river. We floated for who knows how long until there were some large rocks protruding out of the water. As we split up i ended up hitting the first big one and effectively crawling my way through the others. I came out of it unscathed luckily. In the town we had seen many people with battle scars from the river, be it scabs and bruises or one particular girl having a limp, tape and cotton on her chin and wound dressing on her shoulder.

We came along more rocky parts but they weren't as bad as the first. Another nuisance on the river was boat after boat with tourist going up and down the river, creating waves along the way. They liked to come fairly close to your tube aswell.

As we did not have a watch on our person, we did not know what time it was, but we did know the sun was going down and we weren't anywhere near the end. So we followed numerous others as they disembarked at a specific point where tuk tuks were waiting to take people back to town.

We were originally planning to tube on Sunday aswell but we felt it wasn't worth doing again. It wasn't a let down either that we didn't finish because you get a bit sore from the way you have to lie in the tube.


Sunday 23rd

The only real thing we did today other than go out and eat was to get a massage. We found a place, they took us upstairs where there were three rooms. We were led into one where there were four mattresses on the floor, two occupied by half naked Japanese men getting massages. We were led into another room where there was one European bloke getting a massage...with just a towel on. We had originally wanted oil massages but not like this. So we ended up getting Lao massages, which meant our cloathes stayed on. I'd say it was better than the shiatsu one we had better, not so many elbows in the back.