Vang Vieng. What a crazy place. The town is consumed predominantly by back packers of which there is a simple mix of wild partiers, mellowed druggies and drunken hooligans. Combine this with a serious lack of responsibility, authority and care and you can start to understand why it is such a crazy place. Yet, oddly, beyond all this misbehavior, the mix seems to work and everyone gets along. The main attraction here, beyond the lack of authority, is its beautiful and picturesque, mountain and greenery surrounded, river. But the reason that this river is such an attraction is because its lined with bars, nay, mini dance clubs, on both sides and a tradition of tubing the water between them as you decide which bar to be reeled into next. Why drink and drive when you can bucket and float!

The bars start a few kilometers outside of the main town centre. To get there, you can either hire a tube in town for LAK 60,000 (about USD 7.50) and use the included tuk-tuk service or, if you're not tubing, you can grab a LAK 10,000 (about USD 1) tuk-tuk from the main road to the first bar (yip, just tell them you're going to the first bar). The tubes need to be back by 6pm if you don't want to lose your deposit.

The party starts at the first bar and slowly works its way down the river. Bar hoppers can either tube to the next bar, walk to the next bar or swim to the next bar. The crowd decides when to move and where to move and this pattern can be different on any day. By 5pm most of the tubers have left down the river to make sure that they get back to town to hand in their tubes, but the party still continues at the bars until the last of the non-tubers decide that they've had enough. Bars compete for crowds by offering drink specials, free shots, drinking games and the notorious high diving boards and swings which have claimed notoriety through injury and even death. If your skim websites and stories about Vang Vieng, you will see how casually death is thrown out there…almost like its expected and, we guess, who wouldn't expect it when you combine huge volumes of various alteration substances with water, tubes and questionably safe water activities.

The town wasn't overflowing when we were there but there were enough people to fill one river bar at a time. This also meant that by the time the tubers left the bars and the sun started setting, the crowd had only made it to two bars for the day. This resulted in us not actually hitting the water with tubes as it would only have meant that we needed to leave the bars earlier than we wanted. Instead we chose to walk and swim between the bars (which are less than 100m away from each other, even if you crossing the water) and this seemed to be what the majority of people were doing at the time. Do we regret not tubing? Not really as the experience is more about being at the bars than the actual tubing.

During the day, you won't find many people in and around the town and those that you do find will be sitting in the restaurants eating baguettes, drinking shakes and watching Friends or Family Guy. When everyone returns from the river though, the party picks up and continues in town with people steadily stumbling in straight from the river or after a quick and revitalizing power nap. And when the party in town starts to die down people start stumbling to "the island" to continue the party there. Madness. Chaos. Fun.

You can choose how you want to do Vang Vieng. You can be a one hit wonder who comes in for one day of debauchery. You can be the strategic maneuverer who comes in for a few days taking some days on and some days off. Or you can be the lost soul who comes in for a few days and lands up working in a bar for weeks or months. No matter which approach you choose, Vang Vieng should be on any backpackers hit list of places to visit and offers a party that matches any of the world's most famous and hedonistic destinations. It just not presented in as glitzy and glamorous a package.

Trek on…Brett and Darren

P.S. Keep up to speed with where we've been staying and how we've been getting around in our blog posts from Johannesburg