Day 25 - Vang Vieng, Laos

Wow. What a day today. 

Up early to go for a good but very hot 10km run. I head out across the river into the middle of nowhere behind the mountains opposite our hotel. Just me, the cockerels, cows and quite a lot of very placid and lazy dogs on the very rocky road. Hurts my feet after a while. 

Another misty start. 

After breakfast it's time for tubing!!! From what we have heard we weren't expecting too much apart from a leisurely cruise down the river in our rubber ring (tube). How wrong we were. It is nowhere near as mad as it used to be but still very good. 

The next bit of the blog is going to rely purely on my descriptive skills as I unfortunately have no pictures of us tubing. Rivers and iPhones do not mix! 

We meet Trent and Sasha at 11am in town, hire our tubes and then hop in the Tuk Tuk to be dropped 4km up river. After the painful walk across the gravelly car park with no flip flops on we reach the river side, throw our tubes in, dive on and are off. Or maybe not as the river is so slow at this point we are more like water lilly's. We give the first pumping bar a miss as we want to get started. On the river it soon picks up a little pace and we drift down though amazing scenary. It gets a little shallow in parts with our bums even hitting the bottom.  

About 10 mins down river we reach the second bar and decide to stop for one. Rude not to of course. It's about 11.30 by now.  The bar maid stands on a rock and throws a bottle on the end of a piece of rope at us and we pull ourselves in. 

The bar is really cool. Set in the most amazing scenery it has a tiny shack of a bar but plenty of ice cold Lao beer and lots of games on offer. Volley ball, boules, ping pong (Nat came out in a cold sweat at the sight of a ping pong ball), basketball with jets of water firing out from behind the hoop and beer pong. 

We have a few beers and then meet Jake and Scotty, two "Landan" boys who have been traveling for two years and now base themselves out of Sydney to work when they run out of money for traveling. They are good lads and soon get us involved in beer pong. We are all awful apart from Nat but unfortunately is on the opposite team to me. 

Apparently is takes two hours to get back  into town and as the place is really starting to liven up now we spend the time trying to judge if we can have one more and still make it back in time to be picked up for ballooning for 4.30pm. One more turns to two, two to three and so on. We get to 1.30pm and decide to head off. We don't make it very far. We get to the water and then say sod it. We'll get a Tuk Tuk back into town later on  and head back to the bar. Forgot to mention the free shot of local Whisky with evey drink too! Escalating quickly. 

The place is pretty pumping now. Bit like Après at the Follie Deuce but a bit more rustic and in the heat. It's traveller central and actully a lot of Brits here too. 

One quirk of the bar is that every time you get a drink you also get a friendship band (along with the Whisky) which become like badges of honour. (Not quite sure what the numbers mean on our hands. They are written on by the hire place). You can see where this session was going and ended!!

At 3.30pm it was literally the cut off point if we were to have any chance of making the hot air balloon at 4.30pm. We head back to our tubes to make our way all of 30 meters down stream to the third and final bar to get a Tuk Tuk back into town. We jump off the side into the river a few times then climb into our tubes and sail off. There are only three bars in total on the whole route now due to the clamp down and be third bar is rubbish. The second is definitely where it is at (thanks to our London buddies for their great intel or we would have head on down river thinking there was lots more on offer). 

You do see hints of its former glory though. Lots of ladders into trees with old abandoned ledges to jump off into the river and disused zip lines. We can easily see why people died here though. Apparently 22 people last year (not just in this bar). The river is pretty low at this time of year in a lot of places and safety is not their forte. 

We get to the third bar at 3.30pm. Not a bad effort to do 15 mins of tubing in 4 hours. We manage to grab a Tuk Tuk and head back into town. 

Very quick turn around in the hotel before we are picked up to head to the "launch pad" aka a field outside of town. I grab a ride in the back of the yute on the way there. 

 

Ready to go. No nerves due to booze! :-)

Inflation time. Glad we didn't have to do it via foot pump. 

And we are ready to go. 

We hop in the basket and we are off, waving good bye to the chaps that set us on our way. 

Great scenary as always. Slightly cloudy this evening though so not such a great sunset. 

Our kiwi buddies!!

Drunk face Nat. 

Our hotel. 

Getting pretty high now. 

Ominous signs floating over a graveyard with spikey head stones. 

Getting quite close to the trees on the way down 

Closer. 

Picked a leaf for Nat. Don't ever say I never get you flowers / foliage. 

The team racing across the field to take us down in the right place. 

A lovely greeting from all the kids when we land (amazingly smooth landing too and great steering skills from the driver). 

Survivors photo. 

Such a great experience. Highly recommend it. We were buzzing when we got down. Although our hang overs kicked in soon after which tempered our spirits!! We head into town for a bite to eat and literally hit the wall at about 8pm. Not so rock and roll now, although we can be forgiven as we did start at 11.30am. Another fantastic day. Can't believe it is only day 25!