Vang Vieng is a super touristy backpackers' hotspot - busy bars, loud music and bright signs everywhere! (Fave sign was was the Give Pizza Chance restaurant - clever...) Our first night there was Selina's six-month anniversary of travelling, so a few beers seemed only right and proper. A few beers and a nasty bucket of 'Laos Mojito' later, and we'd given in and eaten pizza and fries for dinner instead of more authentic food, beaten some Aussies at pool (well, Selina did, I can't take eny credit in the slightest!) and decided it would be a good idea to trapse off to the 'Smile Bar' by the river. (Very pretty, lots of bars cavered in fairy lights. like Christmas but warmer and with more drunken tourists). Needless to say it was hangovers all round the next day, and I'm ashamed to admit that we lost most of the day in a bar lying on cusions watching Friends (all you have to do is buy one drink and they'll let you stay there all day). I did manage a wander down to the river and round some shops, but otherwise, we were pretty lazy and lame that day!

We more than made up for it the next day, when we went trekking, caving and tubing. The caves were pretty cool and two of them had Buddhas in the entrances. The second one was huge and pitch black once we were fully inside. The walls of the cave were all sparkly, which looked very impressive and there were huge stagmites and stalctites. I let the side down by stepping in a muddy puddle (yes, I should have been looking where I was going!). We tubed through the fourth cave - basically you sit in big inflated tubes and float/pull yourself through the very low mouth of the cave all the way inside. The experience was made pretty scary due to Lao standards of health and safety being pretty much non-existent. They gave us headlights to wear with battery packs that went round our necks on string. Mine even had loose wires showing, which our guide insisted "was safe in Laos". We walked through the caves, crouching down/crawling in places because the ceilings were so low (even for me!), and waded through an underground river before we got back to our tubes - I couldn't tell if we'd gone round the cave in a loop or if we were picking up tubes left the by the previous group, but man, was I glad to see daylight. After about an hour's trekking through villages and countryside we got to do the 'fun' part of tubing - floating down the river stopping at bars on the way. It's what most people come to Vang Vieng for, and the bars were a bit rowdy. Some had zip wires or swings into the river - I braved a big scary slide (looked a bit like a ski jump), which was way faster than it looked and it really hurt when I landed in the water! It was a chilly float back to town after that, luckily our guide was in a kayak so he could give us the occassional prod to aid our feeble paddling. We were pretty tired travellers by the time we got back!

Sorry for the lack of photos so far, the internet connection here doesn't seem able to cope with uploading pictures, I suspect this might be the same ererywhere over the next month or so, so expect a surge of pictures when I get back to Bangkok... I think Selina has a video of my awesome slide feat, I'll ask here to see if she can upload too sometime too...

Bye for now xx