Our next stop in Laos was Vang Vieng, made famous for tubing, we were heading there with our friends we met in Luang Prabang. For those that don't know tubing is where you hire an inner tube and float down the Nam Song river, the only difference with Vang Vieng is that the river is lined with bars and rope swings. As you can imagine this is a recipe for disaster and due to the amount of deaths by people swinging off rope swings into swallow water (death toll last year was 12) the bars have been shut down. However as we made our way down we noticed a few bars had opened up again, so naturally we stopped off and had a drink at them. Tubing was a lot of fun, the scenery was amazing and it was so relaxing just bobbing along. You could still see the remnants of the bars and rope swings and it really isn't surprising people died doing this as the water was really shallow in places.

We had to have the tubes back by 6pm to get our deposit back, unfortunately the river was a lot longer than we thought and we were late losing 20,000 kip ( just under £2). It was a really fun day, even if Kate nearly lost her bikini bottoms going over the rapids (if you can call them that).

After drinking during the day, in the evening we were all pretty tired. We went out for some food and planned to call it a night until the barman in the restaurant persuaded us to go to the "Jungle" party. The tuk tuk there and entry was free so we decided to check it out. Well we wouldn't really call it the jungle, more like a bar with a few plant pots dotted around. We stayed and got some ridiculously strong drinks and made a night of it meeting some very odd people throughout the night, including a Laos woman who gave massages and clicked your bones (neck especially) in a way you didn't think was possible! Needless to say we had a good night, and considering we weren't initially up for a night out we eventually made it back to our guesthouse at about 4am!

The next day we were feeling pretty sorry for ourselves and spent the day at a swimming pool belonging to a neighbouring hotel. Just what the doctor ordered!