5

After a six hour mini bus trip with all the lads we had met over the last few days we arrived in Vang Vieng. We got a room which was like a private joint bungalow with the lads we met, and was overlooking a river and amazing mountains. It was three pound each a night!! Vang Vieng has sights to see but we where there to go tubing. Tubing is basically going down a river with a current in a rubber ring and there are bars on the river. You get pulled in with a bamboo stick and get really drunk, mainly on whisky buckets, which go down quite well after the first one!!

There are big swings and zip wires to go on which are really dangerous, because if you let go before your meant to, you could fall maybe twenty five metres into rocks. Definately would not be legal in England. I had a go anyway on both and they were amazing. An Australian guy fell off in to the rocks an had to have something like thirty stiches in his head!

When you get to the fifth bar you can get a tuk tuk back to hand in your tube in, or you can go to the finish point which is around one hour longer. I headed down the whole way on my own on the second day of tubing. After around fourty minutes it started to get really dark so I sort of thought I should of just got off at the tuk tuk point. Thirty minutes later and it is pitch black and can not see any lights at all. I can just feel myself floating down a river not knowing where I would end up. After another fourty five minutes of pitch black and thinking I should of been back by now, I was thinking I went the wrong way, so I got out of the ring and got to the side of the river. Still in darkness I started walking through the woods, it was like the blair witch project! After about ten minutes of walking through a pitch black forest, I finally saw a tuk tuk from knowhere so he gave me a lift back. I was either lucky or it must happen all the time, but I was f***ing relieved!!

On the third day, one of the lads we met told us that he got a lift in a fishing boat to the end of the tubing point and the boat capsized and sunk on the way. whilst everyone was standing there in the water like what the f*** is going on, the Loas man picked up the engine off the back of the boat and left them!! So they had to get a tuk tuk..madness

The same night I got a tuk tuk back after tubing and as I got there my tube was not on the top of the tuk tuk like it normally is. I asked the tuk tuk driver what he had done with it as I had given it him to put on the roof but he was playing stupid. They would not give me my deposit back, so i was arguing with them, going mad, and finally got my money back, and then officially banned me from tubing the last two days. Quite funny like!!

We used to go to a place after tubing called the bucket bar, were they sell whisky buckets for like 80p so we used to get hammered in there. We would sit around the fire and sing hey jude by the beatles, and other wierd songs which are good when you are drunk! Every bar you go in though sold opium shakes in Laos and you get asked to buy weed everywere....madness.