After spending an uneventful day exploring the incredibly boring town of Pakse we borded our "sleeper" bus for what would be our most enjoyable overnight bus experience yet. The "sleeper" bus was kitted out with 2 rows of incredibly narrow bunk beds instead of seats. The 2 of us didn't have a problem as we are both relatively small but we decided it could be a very awkward night if you had to share a bunk with a random stranger! In usual South East Asian bus style, which we have come accustomed to we had the obscenely loud Karaoke which was complemented by the "cool ringtones" of some local guys who thought it was fun to play them for the bus. hmmm....
Arriving in Vientiane at an ungodly hour was only made worse by the fact that our bags smelt like fish juice- having been sitting next to a defrosting fish cooler all night, it was so gross. We headed straight to JoMa (of Course) for the 7am opening and completely re-couped, brushed our teeth, washed, changed clothes and napped- great! only made slightly awkward by the watching lao staff.
Around midday we went to the airport, very excited to collect Sophie- felt a bit bad as she had come all the way from Australia and we bustled her straight to the bus station when she stepped off the plane.
We decided by now we were hardcore enough for the local bus. We had a bit of a break down and had to sit on the side of the road for an hour whilst they changed the tyre- this was kind of to be expected considering how heavily packed with chicken feed the bus was! We got dropped off at such a suspect point, it looked so much like the middle of nowhere that we were reluctant to get off. We got booted from the bus with locals staring at us as we continuously questioned if it really was Vang Vieng. Evnetually we found the main road after wandering through the remenants of what appeared to be a rather lack-luster funfair and found a reasonable guest house.....or so we thought.
Vang Vieng was as touristy as everyone had made out- perhaps even more so, with bar after bar playing continous re-runs of friends. We thought we would be able to just watch an episode or two but this was disproven after five continous hours of watching. No one is immune! Next morning we woke up to find all of Benaisha's money, along with Sophie's Ipod, Phone and money missing... It was incredibly bizarre as we couldn't quite figure out how and when it had happened, unless people had crept into our room while we were sleeping- which is not a good thought! We ended up trying to find the local police station which consisted of a glorified shack with half naked men sitting around a table playing cards and smoking- very official of course. We were very frustrated by how unresponsive they were, they insinuated that we were making it up and hence couldnt give us a police report. But they couldn't shake us! We perservered and after several more long visits we finally got a police report for Sophie!
The main attraction of Vang Vieng is the tubing which we did on day 2. So Much fun, basically we were shoved down the river in a big rubber ring and occasionally hauled into bars by kids with bamboo sticks. As well as the abundance of buckets and free Lao Lao shots the bars also had really fun rope swings and zip wires into the river. The heights were a tad scary at first but we soon got well into it (helped along by the Lao Lao). Great fun if not a bit dangerous considering the alcohol intake, height and water!
Aswell as tubing Vang Vieng has a great night life with waterfront bars, bonfires, buckets, hamocks and good music- can't really go wrong! We also bumped into quite a few people from home which made it even more fun.
Vang Vieng so much fun, completely uncultured but deffinately what we needed before embarking on the next few days of intense lao culture and history.