Vang Vieng: Tubes, Torrential Rain and Too-Much-Alcohol

Short one today...it’s 1.30am and I should sleep sometime soon as I have a train at 09.20.

...oops never wrote it, overslept, missed train anyway...oops...

So whilst travelling in Laos, I ended up at a small, riverine town called Vang Vieng. I’ll say more about the town itself in a later blog; what I want to talk about now is the town’s most famous attraction; tubing on the nearby Nam Xong river. Well, I say tubing, the town is actually famous for the hedonistic bars you visit whilst tubing.

Now, normally all this fun wouldn’t be my scene at all. But, I felt that I would be letting my few readers down if I couldn’t describe in intricate, drunken detail what tubing is like.

I am doing this for you all.

Definitely not for me.

Definitely.

I decided to start the day with a breakfast fitting for the trials facing me.

This was only part of it - fruit & cereal came after.

We had planned to do the Blue Lagoon in the morning, but my stomach had other ideas, and so I decided we should just get on with tubing earlier, staying at or near bars where there amenities if I needed them.

Also, alcohol totally cures stomach bugs right? The vodka kills all the germs….definitely.

Before we headed out tubing, we headed back to the hostel to leave behind everything non-essential to tubing and drinking. The phone and wallet were left behind, to be replaced by my old camera and a waterproof pouch stuffed with a few monopoly notes of Laotian kip.

Divested of anything that could be damaged by river water, we headed down to the tube rental office on the main street of Vang Vieng, and waited our turn in the queue to pay for our tubes. Ahead were some really, really obnoxious Spaniards who seem to be intent on asking annoying, impertinent questions to the staff. It’s little wonder the staff seem intent on ripping off travellers when that’s what they have to deal with.

Having signed my life away on a quite extensive tube rental agreement (seriously, renting a moped was less paperwork), we hoped on the back of a tuk-tuk, and headed 20 minutes upriver to the first bar on the route that day, where we were greeted by a free shot of lao-lao (local whisky) and a string bracelet (which I presumed they used to work out who had received free shots). It was off to a good start.

Sadly, we were swiftly dismayed to realise we were one of the first groups to arrive. We had got there at about 11.30am, and swiftly realised that for the majority of backpackers, many of which had probably spent the previous day and night drinking, this was far too early. We settled down with a cheeky early drink and admired the scenery whilst we waited for the bar to fill up.

Waiting for chaos.

You can understand why the original tubers came here.

After a drink or two, and a brief run back to the hostel to pick up more money (alcohol is of course overpriced at the tubing bars; bring enough money to allow for this!), the bar was filling up nicely, and the drinking games began. Niko and I decided to stay out of the one pictured below, as we did not feel like being hit by water balloons or having alcohol poured over us. We obviously just were not drunk enough…

Didn't look that fun.

Eventually we decided we should perhaps move on, so we went to find our tubes.

Wait…

Which tube??? tubes? SO MANY TUBES!!!!

We never did find our tubes; we were just told to grab any so we rummaged through and took two of the least deflated, and walked down to the river. To avoid the kayakers and the drunk people lounging in the shallows, I ended up standing in some rapids where I could barely keep my tube from floating away. Eventually when I had a grip of tube, camera, money and sunglasses, we were off down the river….for 300 metres before we encountered the next bar.

Kayaking looked too much like exercise.

I felt I needed to try them all out, you know, to blog the best blog I can blog.

Again, we were the first here, so we had more free shots, more bracelets, and more drinks to wait for the crowd to catch up. In the meanwhile, I taught Niko and some girls from our hostel how to play spoof, and gradually the tubes on the dock below mounted, and the bar filled up.

The tube mountain was growing.

Suitably inebriated, we headed onwards to the next bar, where there were more bracelets and shots, and something altogether more fun.

A MUD BATH

So much fun!

After attempting to wash the mud off me (fairly unsuccessfully, as I found mud in my ear about four days later), I rewarded myself for the exercise of climbing, crawling and swimming through mud with a proper Gin & Tonic, where I specified and supervised them pouring actually Gordon’s gin into my glass. I was getting fed up of being served ‘gin’ which is obviously just lao-lao bleached of its shade of light brown.

I enjoyed my G&T dancing to Katy Perry on the bare decking of the club, surrounded by complete strangers who were instantly best friends, overlooking the beautiful river and karst mountain scenery. Oh Laos.

On to Bar no.4. Niko took the opportunity given to him by holding my camera to take some frankly appalling pictures.

I sure he was aiming for awful crotch shots...

Point proved.

Thanks Niko.

I am however glad I let Niko look after my waterproof pouch containing money and camera, as during this stretch of river I managed to lose pretty much everything else.

It started with my sunglasses falling off my head into the water. I tried to rescue them, and in doing so fell off my tube, and ended up being dragged along the river bed, my bottom bumping on the larger stones. I just kept hold of my tube, but in the chaos lost my T-Shirt and my sunscreen as well as the sunglasses which i couldn’t find.

I was having a successful day…

The fourth bar was...messy. I don’t remember exactly what happened; I can only recall vague snippets.

Drunken antics.

At some point the Macarena came on and I taught a group of South Africans what the moves were to the song….

Drunken antics - macarena??? sexy macarena perhaps?

At some point, myself and a German woman called Eve decided we should get married, only for us to want a divorce ten minutes later because I had cheated on her with her mother father grandfather….

Seemingly very sexy macarena.

I don’t really remember what went on.

I was drunk. It was fun. My parents read this blog so I can’t say much more than that.

Eventually it was time to head onto the last bar on the river. By this point, a tropical storm had closed in, and tubing on the river, you could barely breathe through all the rain. I have never been so wet before.

The last bar was a dead flop, and it was raining hard, so we decided to catch a tuk-tuk back into town rather than tube back into town.

The tuk-tuk driver, like all tuk-tuk drivers, was a bastard, and refused to leave without payment in advance.

The reason why he demanded this was evident when we broke down on the outskirts of town.

Conveniently, his friend had a tuk-tuk sat just across the road, and we were all transferred onto this other tuk-tuk and taken the rest of the journey.

We conveniently arrive back at the rental shop just after 6pm, thereby each losing 20000K of our deposit.

It was all very convenient for the rental office. It was yet another example of things in Laos being ‘convenient’ for the local touts and tuk-tuk drivers, and ‘inconvenient’ for travellers.

....

Convenient.

Left with a sour taste in our mouths from that episode, we headed back to the hostel for a much needed shower and rest, before heading out for food. I was sobering up, and fell asleep in the restaurant, only to wake up when my food arrived, and tip boiling hot cheese down my leg.

Smooth.

My leg that is, now I’ve burnt all the hair off.

…

Aside from the few complaints I have about cheese and deposits, it was an absolute brilliant day, and I was sad that I only had chance to do tubing once, as I feel you need a day to make all the rookie errors and work out what is going on. However, despite the bad press, tubing was an absolute blast, and is completely worth the trip to Vang Vieng.

If nothing else, I gained some bracelets for my wrists.

DSP

Useful Information:

• Tube Rental (and transfer to the first bar) costs 50000K, plus a 65000K deposit. You lose 20000K of deposit if you return the tube after 6pm, and after 8/9pm, you lose the entire deposit, making the tube yours.
• Whole setup is designed to ensure you arrive back after 6pm, so just accept you’ll lose that part of deposit.
• There are 5 bars along the river, all within the first kilometre of the river. Those open change day-by-day.
• Tubing does not get busy much before 1pm.
• Everyone always makes the cardinal sin of not bringing enough money. Beers start at around 20000K, and a spirit and mixer 25000-35000K. Don’t just bring a 100000K note and think that will cover it. It will not. You will be sad that by the third bar you are sober because of your poverty.