Laos: Part Two: Vang Vieng

We showed up for the bus ride to Vang Vieng in good condition. Lord knows, winding around hairpin curves on a bus for six hours hungover would have been atrocious.

When we arrived, we followed the Irish posse to their chosen guesthouse, where we bargained like mad to get affordable rooms with a view. And a great view it was--Mystical clouds surrounded the limestone formations that lined the Nam Som River.

In the room, I discovered some bad news: my backpack crawling with ants! Dozens of creepy, crawly, miniature, marching red ants! There were ants in my clothes, ants smashed up on the side of my toothbrush head, and worst of all, ants in my underpants. That being the case, everything went straight to the laundry.

Vang Vieng is a quiet town but a popular stop among travelers headed to or from Vientiane. There’s not much to do in the town but watch a few episodes of Friends while chowing down on some grub, use the internet, or get a Lao massage.

We rented motorbikes and had a crazy adventure cruising through the countryside. We discovered the most gorgeous scenery, passing cows and kids on the trail. We bumped along dirt roads and across mud puddles and zipped across bridges narrow and narrower.


However, most of the visitors in Vang Vieng are here for one thing and one thing only: TUBING.

It was explained to me as the "ultimate lazy river experience", but, see, this wasn’t an ordinary float down the river. I hesitate to call it “lazy” in any shape or form, because there were very few moments spent calmly floating down the river. Most of the time, I was at the mercy of the river, subtly drifting in the wrong direction at all times, or worse yet, stuck in a hole. Other times, I was wildly paddling to avoid overhanging tree branches or large rocks. Only occasionally, was it a lazy river experience.

Every hundred yards, there was a “rest stop” full of happy-go-lucky tubing machines. Twenty-somethings stowed their lifevests and perched at picnic tables in bikinis or swimming trunks, sipping on Beer Lao and buckets of whisky and Coke. Five or more bars lined the calm waters of the Nam Som, adding a spectacular backpacker twist to the traditional tubing idea.

On our first day, we only made it to the first bar. A young boy reached out his giant bamboo stick to pull us into the off-loading zone. As Christine and I stepped onto the rocky beach, our attention fixated on the the crazy dude leaping off a giant podium within the trees, swinging through the air via trapeze, and then dropping fifteen feet below...Cowabunga!


It was a rush all right. But poor Christine’s hands slipped off the trapeze seconds too early, and she ended up performing the belly flop heard ‘round the world. Her fall was jaw dropping; she just fell out of the sky. Afterwards, her belly was a bit black & blue, purple and yellow for the next week. Luckily, she was able to laugh it off, and share her story and battle wounds with fellow tubers.

Day two, we were much more successful at tubing. We made it to bar number three and four--mud wrestling bar & techno dancing bar--even after someone stole our tubes and we had to walk through the jungle to steal them back.

We didn’t stay long, because sunset was fast approaching, and we didn’t want to be floating down the river in the dark. We cruised on down with the current, until we saw a fork in the river. That’s when we realized: No one really explained where to get off. We were thankful a young Lao girl swam out to us and grabbed hold of both mine and Christine’s rafts. We weren't sure where she was taking us, but she assured us it would only take 5 minutes. We then saw ten other tubers float on past. We suspected we were entering a tourist trap, so we quickly hopped back in our tubes to follow the group down the river.

After we turned the bend, we realized, our leaders were in over their heads, and had to abort mission in the worst of all places. We attempted to carefully pop out of our tubes and try to make an anchor with our feet, but it was a difficult mission with the strong current. A rough landing, indeed, touching down in a swampy wasteland, twenty feet below the pedestrian bridge. I cringed as my feet sunk deeper and deeper into the mud while hiking to shore. It was not a great place to be in barefeet and bare skin at primetime mosquito time at sunset. I cut my toe, and the mosquitoes had a feast.

Despite our failures, we had a memorable time surviving the tubing experience. We well earned our commemorative t-shirts: “in the TUBING Vang Vieng.”

To top it all off, when we got back to the room, I soon learned my ant-infested laundry had been destroyed--My whites were now pink. Uh!

That evening, we sat around the dinner table giggling about the disasters from the day, which became more and more funny as time passed. The day's events prompted a hilarious monologue by Christine, appropriately titled, “I love the city.” Halleluah to that. We'd had enough of the countryside and the Malaria worry. Time for Vientiane.