Vang Vieng is a strange place! We got here on Friday after an arduous coach journey from Luang Prabang. Laos is a great country, but not the easiest to travel through due to all the hills and mountains. An 8 hour coach journey along windy, steep mountainous roads is not something we'd recommend. Along the way we passed village after village in the mountains, with cattle and chickens all over the roads and then we got to Vang Vieng - what was probably a pretty small village until the tubes and tourists came!

The scenery is really nice with the river and limestone peaks, but it's very much a party town for westerners who like to indulge in the excesses of life whilst floating down a river in a tractor tyre inner tube! We went tubing ourselves yesterday and it was great fun, if a little bit of an odd concept. Rent a tube, sit in it dowm a river and then get pulled into bars on the riverside. The bars come complete with rope swing, jumps, slides and even a sand footy pitch at one! The weather was great until a downpour came at 4pm, so we had to wait until it finished and then head back - as the light was going! We arrived back near town and it was pitch black at 6pm - not easy to get off a tube and onto shore when you can't see a thing. It was a really good laugh but probably not the safest water activity around - given the amount of alcohol most people were consuming.

Luang Prabang was a really nice little place and we were sad to leave, the first place where we've felt like that so far. The swimming in the Kuang Si waterfall and boat ride on the Mekong river were probably the highlights, but it's a good place to relax and do nothing. The markets were open every night and so was this tiny food street where ate one night which was very good.

Our next move looks like it may be scuppered a little but by the flooding in Vietnam. we were planning on a few days in Vientiane before heading to Hanoi. Unfortunately Hanoi is currently underwater according to the BBC so we may have to rethink our next move - along with most of the people we've met in Laos as Hanoi seems the next destination for them too. But for now there's plenty more fun to be had in Vang Vieng, as long as you're on a tractor inner tube! Tubing tomorrow anyone?