Greetings all

We have now arrived in Vang Vieng, Laos – the South East Asia home of river tubing. This consists of being ferried 4km upstream on the Nam Song river by tuk-tuk. Upon arriving, you are greeted by 3 bars selling beers and cocktails with music blaring. The aim is then to jump into your tractor inner tube and float back to town. On the float back, various bars throw bottle of water attached to ropes. The aims is for them to entice you into the bar for a few drinks, a swing into the river on a rope swing, zipwire or on a makeshift slide, or partake in a game of “mud volleyball”.

We duly jumped into the dirty river hoping not to get the infamous “pink eye” infection. We had seen numerous people walking around town earlier with eye infections. At that point, we had decided not to swim in the water but merely float and drink.

Our plans were almost blown out of the water in seconds as a guy on our tuk-tuk decided to try the first rope swing and duly slipped off landing from 30 feet in the air to within inches of Lisa. She was ok....just...but had water in her eyes and was a little shaken. So much for trying to avoid the dreaded pink eye.....it still hadn’t appeared two days later though so hopefully we are in the clear!!

We chatted to loads of people on the float and also bumped into some old faces from earlier in our travels, who seemed to be criss-crossing with our adventures.

There is nothing else to really report except the guest house (Grand View), which had kindly left a load of squashed insects on the wall of our bathroom. We can only assume the cleaner was on holiday although when asking why our room had not been cleaned on day 2, we were told that we hadn’t asked. It seemed like a load of baloney to us especially as we hadn’t been told this and there was no “make up my room” signs. Upon checking TripAdvisor, at the end of the stay, we found out the complaints above were pretty consistent. Looks like another crap post for the guest house....good work guys!!!

No wild nights were had by us in Vang Vieng. That said, this is a young town with loads of students in their gap year who were tearing it up drinking BeerLao, buckets (literally) of cocktails and “mushroom” shakes – enough said. Really load music was played out from the opposite bank of the river until 3:30am on both nights we were there. The music did stop for a little while on the first night. “Thankfully” there had been the usual Lao power-cut and everything ground to a halt.....but only for a short while. The next morning we were woken by sound of a jack-hammering from construction works a few yards from the guest house which broke into full voice at around 8am!!

We had booked a flight from Vientiane, our final destination in Laos, into Cambodia on the 16th July 2010 so arranged a 3 ½ hour minivan transfer at 9am on 14th July to get us to the Lao capital city. We have already booked accommodation so hope it all goes without a hitch. On our final day, we bumped into the 3 American girls we had travelled with to Chiang Khong when crossing the border into Laos. Unknowingly, they also booked the same flight to Cambodia. It almost feels like we have been travelling as a party of 5 as we have bumped into each other on numerous occasions.

Our next update will be in a couple of days. In the meantime, please feel free to post comments on the message board so we know someone is actually reading our blog.....lol.

Lisa and Mark