Blog : Vang Vieng

We were up at the crack of dawn in our posh hotel room in Phnom Penh to get ready and catch our absolute mammoth bus up to Vientiane. There had only been one company we could book our travel with and it had cost a small fortune so I was feeling in a pretty begrudging mood as we climbed into our tuktuk at like 7am or something silly. We boarded the first coach which was due to take us to the Cambodian-Laos boarder and take four hours... Almost nine hours later we were crossing the boarder where we were being conned and overcharged left right and centre. The visa cost more than we'd been told; we had to pay the boarder officials to stamp our passports as we exited Cambodia and again to enter Laos (that kind of stamp that you get in normal airports as you enter a new country); we then had to walk the 400m or so with all our bags through no-mans land, which weirdly had about ten cows milling around and a small shanty town set up, which thankfully accepted dollars as we were yet to get hold of any Laos Kip; at what looked like a garden shed, complete with spiders webs and flies was the Laos visa office where the bloke behind the counter tried to con us into paying extra money to submit our forms without passport photos, even though we'd attached our photos ggrrr and then again pay another dollar to be given our passports back, crossing the boarder ended up costing us almost $45!! We then boarded our next bus, a minibus with a random Laos slutty singer video playing on the TV screen at the front. This bus was due to take us to Pakse, where we were to pick up another bus, this time an overnight sleeper to Vientiene, the capital city. The sleeper bus was I thought going to be amazing as we got on, there were rows of bunk beds that looked like full single beds, quite spacious, completely flat and with pillows and blankets - amazing!! But no I was wrong, after Kate and I had settled on what we thought were our allocated beds and got comfortable I got tapped on the shoulder and told I was in someone else's bed and that Kate and I were meant to be sharing beds! Literally we were lying touching each other - pretty gross if your sharing with someone you don't know, especially a rather sweaty Asian! Before getting on the bus we made a dash for the toilets and to grab some food, the toilets were possibly the most rank ever, there was someone in the cubicle next to me that sounded like they had the s***s, was vomiting everywhere and splashing buckets of water all over the floor which came seeping into my toilet, I literally had to pee as fast as I could and get out before I was sick, it was that disgusting! Kate couldn't even go in, she said it smelt so bad! We got totally ripped off buying food as well and ended up paying six dollars for two bags of boiled rice, some cucumber and tomatoes and a lemonade ggrrr! We didn't fancy any of the other street food, BBQed frogs and whole skewered chickens and stuff, gross, although in hindsight rice and veg probably wasn't the wisest of choices. We sat and ate our very basic dinner out of plastic bags and with chopsticks on the bus, which was rather tricky and then the lights were turnt out and we settled down for the night. After the bed swapping issue as if moved over next to Kate I was squished up against the wet condensed window into silky liner being shaken to high heaven, like on one of those power plates, as the roads were so bumpy and we were whizzing along very fast. Our beds were above the drivers cabin so we were right in front of the windscreen and so couldn't get away from looking at the road and all the cars and buses flying towards us! Needless to say it was one of the worst nights sleeps for me ever! I did not get a winks sleep and had the worst migraine ever stepping off the bus at the Vientiane bus station. I also had to run to the toilet and explode all of the dodgy plastic bag dinner as well, which had not settled well with me. I was in a bad way. Kate had spoke to a couple of people and worked out that we needed to get a tuktuk to another bus station in order to catch the next bus to Vang Vieng, our final destination. We'd been travelling for over 24 hours at this point and I was beginning to feel pretty disgusting but we got onto the tuktuk, had our backpacks slung on the roof and off we went. I had such stomach cramps that I had to lie down on the bench as we were driving through what looked like a surprisingly wealthy city. I was massively dehydrated from hardly drinking any water, as I'd been so scared to need to toilet on all those long long buses, which usually only stop once for comfort, but my kidneys actually ached from having to hold so much liquid in as well - I couldn't win! We found a local bus that we were to catch to Vang Vieng and popped our big bags on two of the seats to reserve them as the buses that were just leaving as we arrived had people sat in the aisles, hanging out the doorways and probably a fair few farm yard animals on it to so we wanted to make sure we'd only be touching sweaty each other and that we'd get a real seat! We had a quick wander around, got a plain bread roll to eat and I had to clean my teeth and then we got on our local bus up to Vang Vieng. This one took about four hours and by the time we'd arrived at our hostel we worked out that we'd been travelling for 32 hours so it was no wonder we felt absolutely exhausted and disgusting! Having checked in and dumped our stuff, I really wanted to have a shower and freshen up but found to my frustration that the massive new bottle of creamy body wash that Lora had left for me had not only leaked into the plastic bag it was wrapped in but although through the second bag and through my wash bag and inside of the lining so it was all foamy, but worse it had leaked through most of my clothes and across my backpack, leaving oily greasy marks and a sweet smell everywhere... I tried to scrub it out of everything but with not much luck, so I bundled all my stuff together - really what I felt like doing after 32h or travelling and went to ask if the hostel ladies would be able to clean all of my stuff, which thankfully they said they could... I think I definitely shed a couple of those 'why me, why now' tears! I had my shower in the end and after some really disappointing food and noting that Vang Vieng seemed like an absolute ghost town, I went for a little nap, which resulted in my going to sleep straight away at 4pm and being our for the count until 7am the following morning - that's how much sleep I needed from all the travelling!!

The following morning I noticed that there were ants all over my bed, I assumed where I'd put down the clothes covered in shower gel when is been trying to clean the spill the day before but it was pretty gross to see them all in the bed I'd just slept in :/ we headed up the road to get some breakfast and ended up in the Luang Prabang bakery which was quite nice, I had a big sticky chocolate bun which 100% definitely had a lot of calories in it but it was soo good! And we went to rent push bikes and cycled over to a tiny stream with a little cave and a natural swimming pool. It was really small though and full of naked Chinese men though so we didn't go in and there was kind of a froth on the top which I think was from the stream coming from higher up the rocks. The cave was weeny tiny but still managed to have a big Buddha shrine with all the usual offerings surrounding it... Slightly gone off rice, open fanta cans and shed loads of incense sticks. Buddhists believe they should make an offering of food or drink to the gods before having any themselves although all throughout Asia I've not understood why Fanta and sticky rice are the choice items! We managed to find ourselves a bit of a secluded grassy area where we stripped down to our bikinis and did a spot of sunbathing whilst listening to my audio book - the labyrinth - on the speakers. We did have to keep pulling our scarves over our selves though as monks kept passing the track behind us and Laos is meant to be a very modest country, easily offended by too much skin on show and so SE were trying to respect the culture a little. After another little cycle around and some crappy (and expensive) lunch we went to pack up all our bits and haves wander around the shops. I managed to buy myself a make shift wash bag - a fluro pink dry bag and I repacked all my toiletries into it. We had dinner in one of the bars that wasn't showing friends and ate two disappointing pizzas between us - literally I am feeling the size of a house right now. I wouldn't be surprised if I've put on over a stone and a half since being away and I've never looked forward to being able to diet and exercise so much as when I get home! And I be quite happy if I didn't see the inside of any sort of restaurant for quite a while!! After we'd finished eating and drinking our free banana shake, we sat and watched about three episodes of breaking bad, a new tv series I've got downloaded onto phone. We had a little wander round but saw no bars which were open and the town was still like a ghost town! It was very evident that once upon a time it was heaving with tourists before the tubing got shut down, as all the shops seem to have so much stock yet not shifting any of it any more!

After breakfast and a chill in a bar all morning, Kate watching friends and me sewing my Cambodian and Laos flags onto my backpack, Al and Suzy arrived. We checked into a new hostel where we'd treated ourselves to a four bed instead of going into the dorm which was nice, although we virtually trashed it by the end with clothes and dark hair everywhere bleurghh! They arrived about lunch time and bless, Al was feeling pretty scrotty, so had to have a lie down. We went for some dinner that night and then all spent some time in the Internet cafe booking flights and arranging our next stopovers - us Bangkok and India an Suzy, Vietnam. We didn't have too much of a crazy evening but it was nice to meet Suzy, who was pretty sound and really interesting - lots of knowledge about random stuff!

The following day we accidentally slept in pretty late and by the time we were up and had breakfasted and worked out a plan it was basically lunchtime! We'd decided to rent motorbikes and drive over to the blue lagoon, one lonely planet recommended. Al was feeling really s*** though still so decided to stay behind in the room and just rest up. We rented our bikes, manual ones no less and originally Kate and Suz had said they'd do two to a bike but I said I didn't really feel comfortable with someone on the back, as it feels a bit wobbly at times with just one and I didn't want to be responsible for skinning anyone else's legs apart from my own! In the end we all had a bike each which worked out well because both girls were quite nervous to begin with. We had to drive and fill up with petrol and half way to the station Suzy broke down as she was completely empty so we had to roll her bike to the side of the road and get some petrol in a water bottle and being it back to her and full up her tank! We then drive to the blue lagoon which managed to take up about an hour rather than the supposed 20 minutes. The roads were sooo s*** though, more like dirt tracks with loads with potholes and big boulders that we had to avoid! I was feeling a bit pissy at the fact we had to pay at every turn again though, pay for petrol on top of the bike rental, pay to cross a rickety bridge, pay to enter the lagoon, pay for toilets etc but the lagoon was really cool, it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, more like a really deep river, with rope swings and jump platforms in the surrounding trees. The girls jumped from the high 5m platform but I was way to chicken so just took the photos... Suzy hit her leg on a rock as she landed in the water through which kind of freaked me out! We sunbathed and swam in the water which was shockingly cold but nice and refreshing and just chilled by the riverside. We then decided to climb the 200m up the rock staircase to another cave which was huge! We had to pay AGAIN to rent torches and go up and literally by the top of the stairs we were wheezing and panting and sweating like anything! The cave was pretty massive, probably big enough for a small football stadium to be built inside. There was the standard Buddha shrine but the was dark and earie and the air was kind of damp which always makes the hairs on my neck stand up and freaks me out! We were feeling quite brave and randomly we had someone's dog that had taken a liking to us and was following along, we went deeper into the cave and it got darker and more difficult to navigate a path between steep drops, low hanging rocks and slippery ones. My head torch had lost all of its elasticity as well and with the sweat on my forehead it kept slipping down and hitting the bridge of my nose which would throw me off as the beam of light would move. Suzy was at the front and literally froze and behind her Kate did too as they looked round a corner to see the route even further towards the back of this dank space. I heard them both point and look at something that was obviously not very nice and at the point where Kate said "Liv don't come any further", as Suzy said "its eyes are actually glowing" I have never climes back out of a cave so fast in my life! The whole time we'd entered the darkness, all I could think about was what was lurking in the black shadows. I hate the dark at the best of times and torch light can make the bits not lit up even more sinister, but most of all I was thinking about spiders - Harry Potter Aragon style spiders and I knew that's that they'd seen, with out them havin to tell me. You could call it my spider sixth sense, which has been going crazy recently, feeling cheated that I've managed to avoid seeing one in the whole of Asia and Australia(!) I was thinking it would be my luck to see a massive one on one of my last days :( so I ran, scrambling to get out and way from the caves as fast as possible and I could hear the girls doing exactly the same thing behind me!

We went for dinner that night, after the motorbike rental people tried to scam is by saying I'd done a scratch to the front of the bike that I knew had been there before if even got on, so I had to argue that a bit! We had dinner in a relatively busy restaurant but the food was STILL disappointing, Laos just haven't got their own individual cuisine down, nor can they cook western food very well at all. I went for a Thai veg curry which did not sit well and I think we were all rotating on an off the toilet al night between us. After dinner and another trip to the Internet cafe to try and sort out our India flights once again we went to look for a bar to see in Kate's birthday. We ended up bumping into quite a lot of people who said the bar we were heading towards at one end of the street had just closed - Laos has a curfew like Vietnam apparently, although hard to believe that it was enforced in Vang Vieng when this place was known as the party party town! The gaggle of people were walking to a local place called the Moon Bar and so we follows them along and walked into a one room place playing a mix of Laos and western music at full volume, dimly lit with literally hundreds of locals dancing and drinking and none of them dressed in the supposedly conservative Laos way. There were lady boys everywhere and Laos girls absolutely smashed our of their skulls lolling about! There were a handful or so backpackers in the club as well but most looked either smashed or on something - it was a bit of a weird place to walk into completely sober! The massive signs on the walls saying look after your valuables, purses and phones was a bit of a hard hitter too, we all walked around clutching our bumbags! We danced in Kate's birthday with BeerLao and Lao whiskey for me and Al did very well to stand upright and move at all given how s***ty she felt! We walked home after about an hour as it wasn't the most happening place and the music was pretty terribly to be played that loudly!

The next morning, Al popped out to the Bakery to get Kate a birthday pastry and I put the balloons we'd blown up the previous night all round her bed whilst she was sleeping an arranged her birthday card from home and our presents on the end of her bed. There was her little gold watch, a packet of peanut M&Ms and a disposable waterproof camera to take pics of us tubing all day... We woke her up by playing Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday song really loudly through my speaker! We did wake her pretty early but we thought it didn't matter. It was a nice morning and she sat in bed reading all her cards and emails and everything and then we got up and dressed and went to the bakery for a birthday breakfast and to fuel up before going tubing all day. Tubing is the activity that put Vang Vieng on the Laos backpacker map. It's where you float down the river - not the Mekong, the Nam Song - in big rubber tyre inners. And once upon a time there were bars that lined the river bank that you could float up to and get a drink. I think everything became a bit racaus with lots of free flowing alcohol and drugs, and ripe swings, shallow water, diving boards and mud pits etc and there were over 25 tourist deaths over the period it was open. Relatively early in 2012 the Laos Government shut down the tubing and in late 2012 passed a law making bars on the riverfront illegal. I think this was a massive reason why Vang Vieng felt very ghost town esque as really there was little reason else to visit. Although we'd head that the tubing was still up and running, it was just the bars that had been toned down... So we hired our tubes am brought a bottle of rum between the four of us and each mixed it into a big bottle of coke to take with us and off we went. We wore our flip flops in case there was any glass in the river - from people dropping beer bottles and once again adhered to the Laos cover up policy, we all tubed in bikinis and tshirts which were absolutely sodden afterwards. We were driven 4 or 5km done the road from the town and dropped off at the riverside where we were to float back down the river to the town. As it was dry season, the river was very shallow so we were all quite worried about scraping our bums on the rocks at the bottom, which we did, multiple times! There were loads of people doing it at the same time as us and so it was quite fun, everyone being a bit timid to get in the water in all their clothes at first and then everyone embracing it! It took a little whole to find a comfy position where I could hold my rum and coke and water Boyle together without them getting submerged in the pretty dirty looking river water but once I had I was pretty darn relaxed floating very slowly through the most beautiful scenery, big limestone cliffs on either side of us and so much lush green everywhere! We were floating slowly as the river was shallow and we were getting grounded on the big rocks quite a lot and there were a few bars set back from the river that were open... Ladies on the river bank threw out bamboo to pull you into the bank, to buy drinks. There was free moonshine on offer and you could order food at not too extortionate prices but we were happy to sit and watch people playing volleyball, patong and ping ping whist we caught some rays on the sun deck! We headed off down the river after about an hour to the next bar that we could hear playing music although when we got there it was playing Laos music and no one was really stopping... We carried on floating down the river and Kate got grounded at another shallow bit and got out if her ring to dislodge it and it ended up getting swept away from her and she couldn't catch it - Emily, a Canadian girl who'd sort of joined our group for the day down had to grab it for her down stream! It was so funny seeing her all wet and having to walk over the rocks whilst trying not to fall over and back to her tube! We stopped at another bar which was quite a small and basic one and the girls got a beer before we were shooed out by the owner as "the police were coming" and its illegal for the bars to be open. We didn't see any police arrive though in the twenty or so minutes we were virtually still outside the bar as the river was so slow moving! We thought it might have been a tactic once people had brought a drink to move then in and make space for the next! It took us about five hours to float down the river to the finish point and that was with a bit of frantic paddling and even getting out to walk and avoid a very slow shallow bit. The tubes had to be returned before 6pm else you lost your deposit, or so we thought - it was actually only a 20,000 kip fine (like £2) but we didn't know that at the time and literally ran from the end of the river to the tube warehouse!!

Once we'd finished the tubing, we went in a our wet clothes for some dinner, to a friends bar, the birthday girls favourite! I had a really random baked potato which was actually like round cut chips with a tomato-y and tuna sauce which I had to another with salt as I knew I was dehydrated but couldn't drink any more warm water without really needing to! We headed back to warm up and shower after dinner as once it got dark it was a bit gross and probably inappropriate to be in wet tshirts and bikinis only! We went for birthday cocktails to a bar called fat monkeys which played relatively good music and we all chatted and it was a nice evening. Suzy had to catch her bus to Vientiane at midnight though so at about half eleven we headed back to the hostel for her to sort out her s***. We all waved her goodbye and Al was sad to see her go, as she climbed on the back of a moped taxi to the bus station! We headed to bed afterwards to pack all of our bags up and get some sleep before our 22h journey to Bangkok the following morning!

We were picked up at 9am after scoffing down scrambled egg and croissant at the bakery for breakfast and driven via minibus to Vientiane. We had a two hour wait here before another mini bus to a train station, where we'd pick up a sleeper train to Bangkok. We went for lunch at a nice cafe and I was very naughty and had the lunch set meal which was a cheese sarnie (on whole wheat bread - yummy!) and pumpkin soup and THEN a cinnamon roll! Fat b****! I was eating two meals though as I didn't think I'd be able to eat on the train. As we were travelling on Laos new year - Songkran festival we saw loads of celebrations and couldn't help ourselves but join in a massive water fight happening in a fountain between locals and tourists. Apparently across most of SE Asia the water fights are normal and we saw later at the train station all the boarder offals pissed out of their tree with their faces covered in flour and their uniforms drenched! We got into the fountain and started splashing around. There was free beer being handed out everywhere and we were completely and utterly dripping within seconds! I had a bit if a s*** fit when I realised how wet my bum bag was but everything inside was ok as it had been wrapped in a plastic bag. It was fun though, although getting changed in the street into dry clothes a few minutes before catching the next bus wasn't so much! On the train it was a sleeper with bunk beds too, both girls had paid a little extra for bottom bunks but I'd gone for the top which was rather precarious with no barrier to hold you in? Just one canvas vertical strap and half the width of the bottom bunks. It was an experience though I was telling myself as I was trying to sleep! We talked a lot about India on the train, our next and final destination before home time. And we takes about being sad that our three and a bit month time in South East Asia was coming to an end. It was strange talking about how far away yet how close places like Australia and LA still felt! But for now its time to say Cop Chai Lai Lai to Laos for having us and Hello to Bangkok again for one day before our flight out to Delhi and the last leg of our adventure!