The packed minibus set off from Luang Prabang with us baking in the back seat, the driver refusing to put on the air con because we were going to be driving into the mountains where the air was cooler. He didn't seem to understand my argument about putting it on UNTIL we got into the hills, so we melted for the first part of the journey.

Eventually though, we started climbing from Luang Prabang on winding roads through thickly jungled hills, and although the air was a tad cooler we still weren't comfortable in the windowless back seat of the minibus. We made a couple of rest stops, first at some roadside shacks to get some fruit, and were treated to a great view over deep green valleys through the trees at the roadside.

Our second stop was at a place with a huge concrete balcony built out over a hillside, with incredible views of the valleys below. From then on the scenery was great, as we drove along roads on steep slopes, above deep valleys of terraced rice fields and jungle and impressive limestone formations sprouting from the greenery.

Our next stop, whilst not planned, was expected. There had been a major landslide the day before, with half a hillside sliding down to cover a bend in the road. It had been partially cleared but the earth still covered the road, and had to be levelled off every so often by diggers so vehicles could pass. Consequently, we had an hour's delay in a big traffic jam halfway up a mountain, waiting for our turn to cross the loosely packed earth of the landslide. We did get across eventually though, and carried on between the limestone protrustions and magnificent valleys, before descending to a more level road.

After a final stop, we were on the home stretch to Vang Vieng, at which point our driver apparently went insane. Whether he had a deadline to meet getting us to Vang Vieng or he really needed the toilet we will never know, but he drove like a man possessed along the straight but horrifically potholed road, dodging cows, children on bikes, and not as many potholes as he should have. This spine-jarring hellride lasted until we finally arrived in Vang Vieng, 9 hours after setting off on our 5 hour bus journey.

Thankful just to be alive, we grabbed a tuk tuk with a couple of other people from our bus to the town proper, which was a few km further down the road. The tuk tuk ride wasn't much better for our backs, but it at least got us to civilisation. We spent a while walking a circuit of the town, which consisted of a couple of streets populated entirely with guest houses and restaurant/bars, all of which had exactly the same menu, odd low seats and gigantic screens showing episodes of either Family Guy or Friends.

The street along the Nam Song river, running through the town, offered some fantastic views across to towering limestone cliffs, and as we walked around looking for a nice place to stay, we were presented with a great view of the cliffs silhouetted in the dusk light.

After completing a circuit of the town and being thoroughly unimpressed, apart from with the view, we decided on a guest house near the start of our search, which had clean rooms set around a nice covered patio area and free wifi, as well as 3 cute puppies frolicking around the place.

Ross, a fellow Scot who we had met on the bus, also opted to stay at the guest house, and after dropping our bags off we all headed out for some food. With the restaurants all displaying exactly the same menu, down to the clip-art positioning and prices, our choice boiled down to whether we wanted Family Guy blaring at 100dB or Friends blaring at 100dB. Plumping for Family Guy, we sat down and ordered some food. We were in the mood for western food so went for a burger, and were presented 10 minutes later with two astonishing burgers.

Astonishing in that the roll, salad and all other aspects were of ordinary proportions, but encasing a microscopic disc of mildly charred meat, which we assumed was the burger. Despite their record-breakingly small size, the meat-penny-in-a-rolls were actually rather tasty particularly when accompanied by a banana shake.

After dinner we sat talking for a bit over the sound of Family Guy, before heading back to the guest house. However on the way, my strange food adventure continued as I decided to order a pancake from a streetside cart. Thinking it would be the usual 'slap some batter on a hotplate for a few seconds' affair we were astonished as we watched the most absurd creation of a pancake imaginable unfold before us. Beginning with a rubbery wad of what I took to be partly-frozen dough, the pancake woman proceeded to knead out a roughly circular flap of beige, which was then placed on a hot plate. This was cooked, with occasionaly prodding and stretching, for around 15 minutes with the occasional additions of filling. As it cooked it was folded, flipped, and adjusted innumerable times, until I was presented with a square of fried batter containing peanut butter and banana, cut into bite sized peices and only very loosely clinging onto the description 'pancake'.

However, once again it was tasty and I enjoyed it on the way back to the guest house, where we retired after having our shoes mercilessly chewed by the wrinkly-nosed miscreants sharing the guest house with us.

After listening the rain pouring down all night, we got up late the next day for a very lazy day. We nipped across the road to the other part of our guest house to have our free breakfast then returned to laze around and read, whilst watching the puppies play around, chewing each other as much as our shoes this time.

In the afternoon we took a walk through town, stopping for lunch at a restaurant built out on stilts over the river (showing Friends). The food was again tasty. After eating we wandered in a circuit through town, only stopping at a tour company to see what sort of activities were on offer in the area. With nothing else to see in the town itself, we made our way back to the guest house and looked online about caves in the area, which we thought we might visit.

In the evening we headed out again, this time in pouring rain but armed with an umbrella from the guest house. We ended up at an Indian restaurant which we had heard good things about, and we weren't disappointed. The meal was only spoiled by the drunken, body-painted westerners (mainly Brits) parading through the streets loudly and scantily-clad. These were the returnees from the town's main attraction, tubing, which involves floating down the river in a tractor inner tube, stopping at bars built along the riverside, eventually returning to town in a sorry state some time later.

We realised then that the people of Vang Vieng must have the most skewed view of westerners, as 90% of the people there were the aforementioned drunken idiots, with the majority of the rest being the ones too hungover to go tubing, sitting like vegetables in the Friends bars.

After dinner we went across to one of the post-tubing bars to have a drink, but didn't stay long as we weren't in the mood for a late night. We walked back under our umbrella and played with the puppies for a bit before heading to bed.

Next day, after breakfast we decided to find an ATM but, with the one near our guest house out of action, ended up walking a fair distance away from the centre of town until we eventually found a working machine. Once we got our cash, we realised we had walked most of the way towards one of the caves we had considered visiting, so we decided to carry on and check out the cave. This involved walking down a dirt road to Vang Vieng 'Resort' which seemed to us more like a massive grass area with a few rundown huts than a 'resort', but it was also home to the suspension bridge necessary to cross the river to the cave.

After crossing the swollen river, and paying the swollen entry fee to the cave, we had a look around at ground level before heading up to the cave, the entrance of which was a few hundred feet up the cliff face at the top of an impressive flight of stairs. Across a vivdly blue spring emerging from the cliff face was a small cave housing a creepy Buddha statue and accessed by the world's most slippery steps, which I nearly broke my neck descending. After checking out the Buddha cave we tackled the massive staircase to the Chang cave, eventually making it to the top and being rewarded with a great view over the flat-bottomed valley containing Vang Vieng and its surrounding rice paddies before entering the cave.

The cave itself was not the biggest or most impressive we'd been in, but was fun to explore nonetheless, and had a creepy unlit dead-end at the end of a large chamber which was eerie to explore. The best feature of the cave though, was the opening onto a balcony high up on the cliff face, which offered a great view of the vallley below and the surrounding cliffs.

After checking out the cave and descending the stairs safely, we walked back through the 'resort' to town, stopping to pick up some cheap flip flops, a waterproof bag for our money, and the obligatory tubing t-shirt, in anticipation of trying it out. We then grabbed some food at another riverside restaurant before going to the guest house to change.

Fully equipped for tubing, we then made our way down to the place where the tubes were hired, paid our money and climbed into the tuk tuk shuttle which would take us up the river. After a bumpy ride through town and to the starting point with the tubes strapped to the roof, we unloaded and piled onto a longtail boat which took us across the river to the first bar.

We could see the other bars strung out along the river downstream from us, all fairly the same, consisting of a bamboo platform on stilts over the river, with a covered bar area and occasionally a rope swing over the water. We bumped into two guys who had been on our slow boat to Luang Prabang at the bar and had a drink with them whilst watching the other patrons of the bar playing drinking games all around us, before deciding to head across to the second bar.

Based on the size and speed of the river, Lucy wasn't keen on crossing in her tube, particularly because of a turbulent area of water just in front of the first bar. I persuaded her to get the longtail boat back across and to walk down the path on the river bank, while I hopped in the water with my tube and paddled across to the other bar. The water was pretty fast, with it being rainy season, but the crossing was fairly easy. At the far side, a guy slung a bottle on the end of a rope to me, which I grabbed and held onto as I was pulled into shore.

Once out of the water and reunited with Lucy, I grabbed a bucket of Mojito and a seat for us, where we watched the other people at the bar drinking and dancing with abandon. Neither of us were in much of a party mood, so we took most of our enjoyment from watching the antics of the others, including dancing in formation to some song, and hanging upside down from the rafters in the bar to drink huge quantities of alcohol through a funnel. Once activity I did take part in though was swinging out over the river on the excellent rope swing, which had a great drop into the deep water below.

I was relatively sober, but could easily see how people could get carried away (both literally and figuratively) after a few drinks and end up in trouble doing the tubing.

After our drink, Lucy had resolved to give the tubing a shot, as the water downstream from the second river was much more placid. She also didn't feel she deserved the tubing t-shirt without having actually taken part in any tubing.

Therefore, we descended from the bar, grabbed our tubes, hopped in and began our descent of the Nam Song back to Vang Vieng. We knew it took about an hour to get back to town with the river as fast as it was, so we decided not to stop at any more bars, and to get back before 6pm, after which time we would lose the deposit on our tubes.

With this in mind, we paddled and floated our way past the remaining bars, ignoring the pleas of the owners to come in for a drink. All these bars were much quieter than the second bar, which was evidently as far as most people got before getting a tuk tuk back to town. We seemed to be the only people actually 'tubing'. After passing about the third self proclaimed 'last bar' and navigating a sharp left hand turn in the river, the dark clouds which had been building overhead began to unload in a most dramatic fashion. We were already soaked from being in the river, so the deluge from above didn't make any difference other than to make our journey downstream that bit more dramatic, and fun.

At one point, we decided it might be best to try and get a lift back to town, so I climbed out and up the riverbank on a rickety ladder with a sign proclaiming 'tuk tuk'. However, I only found some houses and although there was a tuk tuk, there was no driver.

We realised then we would have to paddle all the way back to town. Our only concern was that we wouldn't make it on time, so we began assisting gravity by paddling, gliding through the jungle until we saw the river split up ahead. We knew we had to take the left fork to get back to town, so paddled that way and soon found ourselves surrounded by the buildings of Vang Vieng.

Once we were back in the town, kids started coming down to the riverbank, shouting at us then jumping in to swim after us. We weren't sure exactly what they were up to, so we paddled faster to avoid them. Our closest call came when two jumped off a bridge into the water right behind us, but through excellent teamwork (Me paddling, lucy splashing the kids) we evaded them and their potentially nefarious intentions, eventually pulling into the riverbank just upstream from the tubing shop.

We hauled our tubes out of the river, jogged up and over a bridge then up the hill to the street with the tubing place, arriving at 5 minutes to 6, just as they were about to close up. With a wonderful sense of vicotry, we gladly reclaimed our deposit (about £2 each) and returned triumphantly to our guest house for a shower.

Showered and in dry clothes, we headed out once again armed with our umbrella to get some food, before going back for an early night after a busy but enjoyable day.

The next morning we had another lazy start, only getting up in time to get our free breakfast across the road. The rest of the day was also lazy, as we spent most of our time around the guest house editing our photos. We only headed out to get some lunch, and later that evening, when we decided to complete our Vang Vieng experience by sitting in a bar after eating and watch Friends. For whatever reason (maybe the accidental addition of 'happy' ingredients to our food) we found this one of the most enjoyable evenings we had had lately. We stayed much longer than we had planned, drinking quite a few beers and laughing ourselves silly at Friends. Despite our initially critical opinion, maybe the Laotians had us westerners pegged perfectly, and all we need for a good time is some beer and Friends on a big screen.

After inexplicably staying in Vang Vieng for such a long time, it was time to move on. The next morning we got up and loaded our stuff into a tuk tuk which took us to the bus station and onto a larger, (and air conditioned) bus for the trip to Vientiane.