Continuing from Luang Prabang, We were picked up at 7am for our minibus journey to Vang Vieng. The journey went without a hitch but both Gemma and Nick were feeling queasy the entire journey but the rest of us were fine. Thankfully!

We arrived at Vang Vieng at 1pm and the 4 girls immediately found accommodation right outside where we were dropped off by the minibus, I think they couldn't be bothered to shop around. Both Nick and I wanted something outside of the centre so headed towards the river.

We visited at least 5 different bungalow sites and we eventually settled on a cute riverside hut. Nick went for a nap to try and sleep off his poorly tum, and as Helen was bored she decided to read in the hammock on our balcony and fell asleep peacefully only to be woken up by hundreds of cows mooing as they were travelling down the river (and Nick taking photos of Helen - Charming!)

The evening was spent eating expensive Western food as Nick was still feeling unwell and watching reruns of Friends. Vang Vieng has a thing for showing reruns of Friends or Family Guy...it feels like you've time travelled to the 1990's.

Vang Vieng is popular for 'tubing' - You get driven to a spot 3 kilometres north of VV and then you sit on a tractor inner tube and drift down the Nam Song River stopping at various bars until you arrive back at Vang Vieng. Obviously, all of us wanted to do tubing so we met for a big brunch to line our tums before grabbing a tube.

The VV community have organised themselves into a cooperative association to sell tubing as an activity. All households in VV (1,555) are divided into 10 village units, with each village unit taking its turn on a ten-day rotation to rent inner-tubes to the tourists. (Now you know where your rental money goes!).

We started at the first bar where we got free shots of whiskey (we later found that all the bars did free shots of whiskey!) and started drinking the first of many buckets, we played several drinking games (Mischa, Alysha and Helen were delighted to beat Nick, Gemma and Coco at Beer Pong) and some bars have a zip wire or a slide into the river. One bar even had a 'blob' where you jump onto it and when the next person jumps on you go flying into the river.

Helen was being a boring old fart as usual as she was frightened of injuring herself and relished in the role of camera woman; but decided to give the slide a go as it looked innocent. Bad mistake - Helen was winded from the jump and later on had a massive bruise all over her left side. The whole experience was awesome and we all really enjoyed ourselves.

We did get a bit carried away at the first couple of bars and lost track of time so at the last bar we agreed that we would have to 'swim' back to VV in order to make it back before the 6pm deadline otherwise we would lose our deposit.

This is where things started to become awkward, Nick found Alysha by herself, the other 3 were nowhere to be seen. Helen agreed to stay with Alysha and ensure that she got back to VV safe and sound by tuk tuk - Nick continued down the river in order to find the other three. Eventually Nick returned back to VV and it turned out that Mischa, Gemma and Coco did make it back to their guesthouse and were tucked up in bed. Obviously, we were well gutted as we didn't think our evening would be over at 6.30pm and wanted to carry on drinking! What lightweights :)

After we finished our drift down the river, we later found out that Tubing claimed 22 lives last year and the last death only 2 weeks ago! A very sombre feeling indeed, but we made it!!

The next morning, we both woke up minus hangovers which was a very nice feeling and after a bacon sandwich we caught our bus to Vientiane, the capital of Laos.