Vang Vieng
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2008
1
13
15
Trip End
Oct 20, 2009
Vang Vieng,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Thursday, March 26, 2009
The coach rattled through the matted green jungles of Laos finally satisfying our image of SE Asia if not the reality we had witnessed. Our destination was the town of Vang Vieng hijacked by wide-eyed Western youths keen to take full advantage of the instant party and homely comforts on offer.
We arrived in low, mottled cloud eerie trails of misty grey gathering around magnificent vertical limestone crags like something out of a Japanese silk painting. We settled into our stilted bamboo bungalows amid a shaggy overgrown garden and erecting a mosquito net safe zone we set out about getting the low-down on the town's de rigueur activity of 'tubing'. This involves floating leisurely down the Mekong river from a start point with a Beer Lao in hand and stopping in however so many bars along the banks as you choose. The open air bars only served booze in children's sandcastle buckets and offered mud pools, free shots and free slides and rope swings into the dangerously low waters of late March to entice you in. Unsurprisingly, not many people actually make the 3-hour drift back to Vang Vieng on the tube and are taxied home (or to hospital) in mini cattle trucks when this party of the party shuts down at 7pm. Back in town on a small natural island detached from the mainland by a thin trickle of water hammocked bars with grassy dancefloors provided the night-time entertainment. To complete the picture, those in need of help during the day and couldn't face the Spring Break mayhem of the river cushioned restaurants show wall-to-wall Simpsons, Friends or Family Guy to the horizontal masses.
So, with this background of dancing, joking and jostling the setting bore more than a resemblance to a festival (or 'the fezzy' as Fi would have you say it) and this theme was to run through our 2-week stay in the hedonism. Quite fittingly we (sorry, I) lost the watch in the river but like satellite TV once the thing you think you can't live without is gone you don't miss it in the slightest - what could possibly be easier than eating when you're hungry, sleeping when you're tired and just running with the day. I was starting to feel like Huckleberry Finn!?
Stories throughout the fortnight from everyone about their injuries or injuries of others they knew or friends of friends injuries or infamous Vang Vieng injuries - arms in slings, broken ribs, countless cuts and bruises from the rocks in the river or walking on glass, people getting hit by tuc-tucs, people dying on the slides - all sorts! However, all this did little to dent shaved monkeys swinging in to the river to impress the bikini-clad girls with scraggily blonde hair who hid behind oversized 'Sue Pollard' shades. The breeding here, it has to be said, was of excellent quality.
For me, however, there is only so long you can suck your stomach in for and it was nice amongst the false, hypnotising world to meet a group of lovely people for one of the weeks - finally finding some much missed British irony and ridiculousness.
We did hire a motorbike to explore the surrounding villages and see the hazy razors of rock up close but to be honest it was all about the 'fezzy'. Chilled Lao and its people were such a breath of fresh air for us after Vietnam & Cambodia and though labelled the most bombed country in the world and financially very poor we saw a real richness in the people in terms of genuine happiness and ease with each other. That said it was the first time on our travels that we'd been asked for food and not money from 3 young Laotian boys (possibly brothers) and this hit home a little especially amongst the western rich-kids who seem nowadays to have mistaken being put on buses round SE Asia for travelling..
our bamboo hut
