Tubing in Vang Vieng

The minibus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng was six hours of torture as we traveled along increasingly windy and bumpy roads.  Neither of us get travel sick but by the end of this ordeal, we were ready to join poor Yvonne in the green face brigade!  We made our way to the guesthouse that I had booked for all of us, were greeted by a Cork fellow, only to be told that the owner (also Irish) had given away our rooms, despite the booking.  The Irish really know how to look after their own eh!  We walked around for another half hour looking for somewhere else and finally settling on a resort that had a pool by the river and rooms that on first glance looked lovely.  We were definitely paying over the going rate for accommodation in VV ($35) but from the stories we heard (think ants and cockroaches), I don't think we did too badly.  However, in the couple of days we spent there, neither of our rooms were cleaned despite repeated requests.  We found out later that the owner did not trust her own cleaning staff and apparently we would have been taking a serious risk by having the room tidied!  Bizarre!

Views on the road to Vang Vieng

 

Vang Vieng town itself is a fabricated tourist hole, purpose built to appeal to westerners who want to get drunk, stay in bars late drinking cheap buckets of mixed spirits and wander around half naked.  However, the main draw of the town is tubing.  This involves hiring a rubber ring, sitting in a river and floating down past rows of bars built on the banks at either side, pumping out playlists of music which I love and Rob hates (some exceptions noted!).  The general route would be thus: get in the ring, float past a bar, get a rope chucked to you by the bar staff who drag you and your tube in, get given a free shot, buy a drink if you are so inclined, do an activity (cover yourself in spray paint, huge swing over the water, huge slide into the water, etc), get back into the ring, float past another bar, rinse and repeat.



Neither of us were expecting to enjoy it as much as we did.  In fact when we got to the first bar, both Rob and I and Sebastian and Yvonne were wondering what we had gotten ourselves into, but as a social event for backpackers it does take some beating.  Mutual inebriation leads to meeting some interesting people!  We formed a group of about 7 from the start who floated down together (most of whom we had met on the minibus the previous day). None of us got too drunk (not a good idea to be wasted in a moving river) and we had a great time.  Things started getting cold from about 4:30pm when the sun went behind the mountain, and it became clear we weren't going to reach the end of the 4km stretch to get our tubes back to the tubing centre in order to get our deposit back by 6pm so we jumped in a sawngthaew and managed to get there for 6:05pm and luckily no questions were asked!  It was a great day out, so much so that we decided that we would stay another night in VV and explore the countryside.

Resort river view

 

Unfortunately, that didn't exactly go to plan, as that night the two of us got struck down by food poisoning (yes, again!).  Reports the next morning were that Yvonne was sick that night too but was fine now and that Sebastian obviously had a stomach of steel!  In any case, we were confined to the bed for the day while the other two hired bikes and toured the countryside.  By all accounts we didn't miss much but it was still disappointing not to have seen what else was VV had to offer.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of photos in this post.  Camera + Water + Drinks = Recipe for disaster.  We thought it best to leave it at home.

One for your amusement!