Luckily Laos gets much better from this point onwards as our next stop was the infamous Vang Vieng.....most famous for its crazy tubing and drinking!! Unfortunately some people decided to spoil the fun for the majority by dying here....27 of them in a year to be exact...so now everything is much tamer!!! First up for us was some rock climbing and abseiling....great fun and Phil has the bruises to prove it!!! We did 3 climbs of varying degrees and definitely used muscles that we did not know existed..We would really recommend this...climbing in a spectacular setting.

Fortunately it was not our drinking muscles that were tired, as tubing was up next for us!! Nowadays there are no swings, slides or zip lines, just 3 bars to break up the journey down the river....so we set off and very soon were 'fished' out of the river and into the first pub, this involved a fella on the bank throwing a fishing line with a water bottle on the end of it to make sure we didn't sail past! We played volleyball and had a few drinks with a nice group that were on the river at the same time....in its heyday there were about 500 going down the river a day, whereas on our day there were about 40!!..But it is actually spectacular....and we were able to appreciate it now that the main aim isn't to get as drunk as possible!!! We decided to leave that till later where we met some of our river group and proceeded to drink more than our fair share of lao lao (local whiskey) and paid the price for it the next very unproductive day!!!

Once we had recovered we got the very twisty and spectacular bus journey to Luang Prabang.....some of the tubing group had decided to do a trek, home stay and kayak, so we decided to join them!!