Hello everyone from Vang Vieng, Lao's party town - well sort of, even when it's busy it's kind of sleepy.

We've been here three days now and the weather has been spanking. We arrived early afternoon and found a nice place to stay on the water front before heading in to town to visit the bars. There are only bars and souvenir shops here. Oddly the bars are either playing friends or family guy on continous loop, all day, all night, non stop. Its ok some of the time but must get pretty annoying fast.

The next day we went for a paddle in the river, Claire was in two minds about the tubing, some of the lads we met the previous night were destroyed and had some real horror stories about losing their stuff and cutting them selves on rocks.

(For those who don't know the big thing in Vang Vieng is to get in a tractor inner tube and float down the river from bar to bar trying to get free drinks by doing stupid jumps, climbs, slides and falls into the river.)

So instead of tubing we went for a massage. Claire really enjoyed it as the small laosian gorrilla women managed to get her back to crack in the right places. Mine I swear invited ten of her friends round and beat the stuffing out of me (edited for mums). I could barely walk afterwards so we crawled of to the bar/cafe for a very late lunch. Then we went for a lay down, later tea - by now I was a space cadet and some people thought I had been drinking all day - I wish!!! In the end claire had to help me home and then go back for a chocolate pancake as the smell was likely to make me hurl.

That was a fun night of pain, followed by a morning of bathroom antics. Luckily yesterday was the local boat/full moon festival, so we spent the day moving from bar back to the hotel back to the bar watching the races and snoozing. It was really amazing the teams were flying along as the current around here is pretty strong and they have teams of about 20 in a boat. Claire was especially happy when she saw one of them sink mid race.

On our way to dinner our hotel owner and his family invited us to join in with them drinking beers... Only later did I realise if you looked at me I looked like I had spent all day drinking beers too!

That evening during dinner (so far I had eaten a shake, two cans of diet coke and a lot of water) I half finished a burger and chips, while claire had to wait ages for her macaroni and veg, which they forgot once and then they sent out the wrong food, luckily the bar was very well placed.

From this bar we saw the monks launch their fire boat - a huge bamboo kayak covered in flaming candles. This was followed by lots of little flower "crowns" with candles that the locals sent floating down the river. Finally an even bigger fire boat was set off and the world exploded in teeny tiny fireworks (most launched by kids) from the end of a firework rod. Basically a bamboo tube that went of like a small mortar. We only saw a few near misses.

That night I was restless (gross fact coming up skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know). Surely seven immodium are meant to work right?

So we got up this morning and after much trying to hold it together we decided it was tubing today or never. So we got our tubes and headed out in the tuk tuk to the start point upstream. It was a bit weird, we litterally got dropped of at the first bar, I thought we'd get to tube a bit first. And it was pretty busy - maybe 30 people. By now its about 2:30 and the sun set not long after 6 so I'm not sure how far they are planning on going.

We politely but firmly say we don't want a bucket of cocktail and to the owners annoyance we actually get in a tube! Next follows about 15 minutes of sureal dance mayhem as we float past a packed half a mile of bars playing loud music and trying to coax you into their bar and play on their death slides.

We stopped at one, I still didn't fancy a beer, but it was fun to watch the local lads launch themselves off a diving board onto a giant bean bag in the river.

From there we slide past a few more bars and break free into the countryside. Its really peaceful and we splash our way down the river being passed sporadically by canoe groups.
The views are awesome and the tubing is really quite relaxing without the alcohol. Unfortunately as we had already lost one camera we didn't want to risk another taking photos on the way down.

Some time later we come into view of the town and are mobbed by three local kids who are quite funny and hang on for a ride back to the centre of the town. They even join in for a race with us near the end. I forget who won... But claire did have the 12 year old boy, I only got a 7 year old girl helping.

Now we are chilling in the hotel after having had a shower, tomorrow we leave for Luang Prabang.

Team P