Vang Vieng is known as the 'party town' of Laos and everyone I'd met that had been there told me it was very touristy so I was surprised when we arrived to find a tiny sleepy village with mostly wooden buildings, none more than two stories high, and cows/goats/chickens walking around the main street. Yes, it does cater to travellers with western food and internet cafes everywhere, but it's a far cry from Ibiza! It is so so chilled out, it's great

There's a strange trend in town - the main tourist street is lined with several restaurants that have TVs showing Friends all day long and the chairs are like beds so people can lie down and veg out for as long as they like (some places try to be different by showing Simpsons/Will & Grace/films but most show Friends). Seeing as this is how I spend most of my weekends in London, I was loving it!

Undoubtedly the top attraction in Vang Vieng is tubing - floating down the river in a rubber ring, stopping at a couple of bars along the way and swinging/jumping off tall wooden platforms into the river - it is a bizarre activity, I don't know how they came up with the idea, but it is good fun! However, it is a recipe for disaster when stupid foreigners get involved - there are endless stories of fatalities and injuries arising from tourists getting drunk and out of control on the river, one English guy died just a couple of weeks before we arrived, so we were relatively well-behaved. Jumping off the platform was terrifying, no matter how many times I did it. The next day I was aching all over and had bruises on my leg from one rather ungraceful landing on the water when my hands slipped off the swing - I don't know how some people do it day after day, they must be much stronger than I am!

The town is jam-packed with backpackers (of which three-quarters seem to be Irish), who all do the same thing during the day (tubing and Friends), wear the same things (either the tubing t-shirt or the Beerlao t-shirt) and go to the same couple of bars in the evenings.

I also went to the Tham Chang Caves (there are lots of caves around Vang Vieng but these are the most accessible). The entrance is halfway up a mountain, up two-hundred-and-something steps, and the view from there was beautiful. Inside there are paths and most of it has lighting but we also checked out a section of the caves that wasn't lit up just using my head torch - this must be a popular spot for Lao kids to graffiti - it looked like something from a horror movie when I shone the torch around to reveal the strange writing all over the walls of the cave!

Oddly, boules seems to be popular among the locals - it must be a hangover from the days of the French. Also, in Vientiane, many of the public buildings had their names translated to French.