3rd November 2009 - 5th November 2009:

Our journey from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng was only about four hours however it felt like a lifetime. Liza has developed some sort of acute travel sickness - must be the fact that we seem to spend more time on buses than we do on solid ground.

We later found out from a Lonely Planet guide book that it is one of the worst journey's - they actually handed out sick bags - in SE Asia and the second most dangerous (after the speedboat!!!!) so are actually rather proud of still being alive. Given this we are glad to report that Liza only threw up the once, which was some old achievement given the greeny colour her face was throughout the whole trip!!!

Vang Vieng was like something out of Magaluf, streets crammed full of 'TV bars' showing re-runs of Friends (instead of Only Fools and Horses) which actually was quite relaxing and provided for some easy watching over dinner. The hostel we stayed in definitely had the hardest beds we had ever slept in and at one stage we even considered sleeping on the floor for extra comfort.

On the following day we went in search of the infamous tubing along the Nam Song River and after about 30 minutes we found the place, got the info and decided to just grab our stuff from the hostel and give it a go. We returned to the centre, signed 'our contracts' (the usual we take no liability if you die… but enjoy yourself statement) and got into a tuk tuk to take us to the start point. However this was not before Liza asked for her life jacket to the utter shock of the man running the show. It turned out that out of the couple of hundred people tubing along the river that day, Liza was the only one in a lifejacket that we saw - we could now understand his disbelief.

We were flabbergasted when we arrived at the starting point as it looked like a scene out of an American Spring Break movie….. everyone was dancing on little wooden bars, dancing away to loud music, drinking shots and jumping off swing ropes into the river - not the leisurely float down the river we were expecting.

To try and escape from the annoying spaced out hippie dancing American girls we decided to jump straight into a tube with some other English guys we met on the tuk tuk. The idea is that you float down the river and every 100meteres or so there are little wooden bars with people throwing out ropes to drag you in. So basically we would just stop at a bar along the way, get our free shot, have a beer and chill out before moving on so that we always stayed one bar ahead of the hippie dancers.

We got to one bar which had mud volleyball and mud tug o' war which we did abstain from - well that was until Liza decided to take a picture of some guys covered in mud and he thought he would get his own back and give her a big mud hug - check the picture out in the gallery!!

Our next bar was one with a huge waterslide on it and given we had not tried out any of the other swing ropes we thought we would give this one a go. We walked nervously up the stairs and at one point Liza was about to turn back but Sean said 'you better do this……'. We both did go down and despite the sore arse and back from not landing properly it was actually quite fun - although not fun enough to do it again hahahah!

The final bar which we went to had a pool table in but the bar was in a desperate need for a makeover as the wooden floor had some major holes in that made for some tricky shots. At this time it was getting close to the cut-off time for getting our full deposit back so we finished up our game of crazy pool and downed our drinks and went to collect our rings - only problem was that we could only find three…. and we were in a group of five!! After working out that it must have been the pesky group that had left a few minutes before us who nabbed them and just as we were about to start a game of rock, papers or scissors to decide who got the remaining rings we managed to find some "spare" ones and jumped in them (well we did have a $5 deposit to get back).

We drifted along the final part of the river but the sun had started to set and it eventually turned pitch black which is not good when you are in an inflatable tube and don't know where the ride stops. After passing a few places that we thought might have been the end and having given up on the idea that a big neon sign flashing "FINISH" wasn't going to appear we eventually got out of the river after seeing some guy standing on the banks waving a flashlight at us. At this stage we were cold, wet, tired and had to do the customary haggle with the tuk tuk driver we eventually agreed a price and he took us back to the centre so that we could drop off the tubes.

All in all it was a good day and we finished it off with pizza and Friends - doesn't get much better than that!