Once upon a time, Vang
Vieng was a very small rural village in the depths of the Laos
countryside. Set amongst a stunning back drop, surrounded by blue
lagoons, a river and spectacular mountains, it was a place of
spiritual importance to the Laotians. Originally, it was a place
where few backpackers visited, and those who did were just there to
enjoy the nature and the basic way of life. And then... tubing
happened. Basically, someone had the idea of renting out rubber inner
tubes from tyres, to travellers so that they could float down the
river and look at the scenery. Today this has developed into a mini
Ibiza on the river, with bars along the way, that travellers stop at
to get get wrecked, whilst playing on things such as trapezes and
throwing themselves into the river. I really can't describe it better
than this article does, so if you are interested in knowing more,
read this:
Also, for a laugh, watch this, it made me cry with laughter:
Anyway, so that's Vang
Vieng, but before I get into our experience of Vang Vieng, let me
first write how we got there. We got up early on our last morning in
Luang Prabang to catch a VIP bus to Vang Vieng. The reason we had
booked a VIP bus and not a min van as most travellers take, is that
we had read various horror stories about the minivans. So we paid a
few pound more to go on a coach, and we were waiting for our pick up
to take us to the coach station, which was meant to come at 8.15am to
get us to the bus station for 9.00. It got to 8.15am and a tuk tuk
came and picked up some other girls from our hostel but told us we
weren't on that tuk tuk and we couldn't get on. So we waited and
waited, and it got later and later, and I asked the owner of our
hostel if she could ring and see what was happening. So she rang and
they said they were coming. It got to 8.50 and I started to sweat
with worry. If our tuk tuk didn't come soon, we'd miss our VIP bus
and waste the money we'd paid in advance for our hotel in Vang Vieng.
8.55 it finally came, hardly enough time to get us to the bus
station, and it wasn't even a tuk tuk, it was a minivan. At this
point I guessed that the company had taken our extra money for the
VIP bus and put us on a hellish minivan anyway. Luckily, I was proved
wrong, when the minivan pulled into the bus station and told us all
to get off. It was now 9.05. So we all got off, and were told to get
into another, much more cramped minivan, with no legroom whatsoever
and no aircon. The travellers were packed in there like sardines. We
got in anyway, even though I was angry at having paid for a VIP bus
and was now going to have to do the nightmare 6 hour journey cramped
in a minivan. When we were in, there was a big commotion because
there weren't enough seats for everyone. That's when I told Jemma to
show the man our tickets and tell him we thought we were on the wrong
bus. So she did and a big grin came on his face and he told us to get
off and that our VIP bus was just around the corner. We couldn't see
any VIP bus around the corner, so we were convinced he was tricking
us, so we refused to get off. He started to get quite angry at this
point, but we stood our ground and said we didn't want to get off
because it was too late for the VIP bus and it would already have
left without us, leaving us stranded in Luang Prabang with no refund.
Eventually when we could see he was getting very angry, we got off
because we didn't want something bad to happen, and then we ran round
the corner, dragging our rucksacks, hoping that the VIP bus was still
there and that he wasn't lying.
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| VIP bus |
Luckily, we got there just in time as
it was about to pull off, and we were so relieved. It was a much more
comfortable coach, with aircon, meals and lots of legroom. When we
got to Vang Vieng, the people who had come on the Minivan we were
supposed to go on said it was pure hell.
So, we got to Vang
Vieng and it was raining heavily. We decided to just to go straight
to a restaurant for tea. That's when we had our first experience of
Friends re-runs. Almost every bar/restaurant in Vang Vieng plays
Friends re-runs on a loop. Either that or Family Guy. Vang Vieng is
like an extreme case of Western Tourism making a place ugly: A
beautiful river with drunken, rowdy western backpackers floating down
it, a small town that's been turned into a mini Ibiza and restaurants
that serve western food and play nothing but Friends: It was
dreadful.
 |
| They play my worst programme Friends, everywhere! |
Anyway, the next morning, we got up and went tubing
(Paradise is ruined already, us not going tubing isn't going to save
it). We got these big rubber rings and then a tuk tuk dropped us off
at the river, where we got in and floated down. The first bar we came
across was at the riverside and was selling drinks with a sign saying
'buy a drink, help children' purporting that any profits from the
drinks would go to help children. We didn't intend on drinking (I
don't like drinking in the day, and there are far too many horror
stories about travellers dying whilst tubing), so we skipped that,
and floated down the river past a few bars, hoping to spot our
friends in one, but we couldn't see them anywhere. At each bar, a man
would throw a bottle attached to a string to us for us to catch so he
could pull us in. We ignored these bottles, and Jemma actually got
hit on the head by one. We floated on, on the river that was quite
fast due to it being the wet season, until we eventually went past a
bar that was called 'the last bar'. We hadn't seen any of the drunken
people/behaviour we had read about online or in the news papers; all
the bars were really quiet and our friends weren't in any of them. So
we floated on, assuming that the bar was lying and that it wasn't
really the last bar. It turned out to be the last bar and so for the
rest of the river, we just floated along in peace, looking at the
stunning countryside, and burning simultaneously. (I hadn't put on
much cream because I'd assumed we'd see our friends at a bar and get
out to talk to them/ put more cream on). It was quite an uneventful
tubing session, which I wasn't sure whether I was happy or
disappointed about. On the one hand I'd quite like to have witnessed
the drunks throwing themselves off trapezes, but on the other hand,
it was nice to have the river to ourselves and not have some drunken
yob landing on our heads. When the river came back round to the town,
two small boys swam over to us and pulled us ashore. When we got out,
they demanded money. When we gave them money, they demanded 'more,
more!'. They were cheeky, enterprising little scoundrels, who I have
no doubt will grow to be the next generation of riverside bar owners.
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| Tubing |
That night, we went for
food, finding one of the few places that wasn't full of drunks/and
Friends re-runs. And then we went to bed. We were both quite ill; me
with a migraine, Jemma with back pain.
The next day, I really
wanted to go on a bike ride to the blue lagoon – a wonder of nature
where you can jump into the unusually blue waters (made that way by
minerals) but we were both so ill we couldn't get out of bed. I had
the worst migraine ever and was actually sick from it. It was an
awful day, trapped in a dark room, trying to sleep but not being able
to. At one point I managed to get myself out of bed long enough to
walk down the street to book tickets out of Vang Vieng. I was so
happy the next day when the migraine had gone down a little bit and
we could finally leave Vang Vieng. That will not be going down on my
list of places to return to!
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