Second stop in Laos: Vang Vieng! World famous for only one business: TUBING. Most of you have already seen pictures on Facebook but I'll explain you here what it is all about.
A typical day of tubing starts with...sleeping in. Oh yes, there is no haste in the sleepy town of Vang Vieng, no rush to be the first one in the tube, on the water or along the shore because you'll be the only one and all the 'attractions' on your way will be deserted. So around noon, you head for the central tube station in the village, you pay four dollars for using an inflated tractor-tyre tube and about eight dollars deposit. A number is written on your hand, so if something happens to you, the tube owner will be able to identify the bad tourist that didn't return his precious toy. Then, it's all in a mini-van, tubes on top and drop-off three kilometers further at the left bank of the Nam Song river. If you think, like us, that you can start floating down the stream right away, you're wrong. There is a compulsory stop at the other side of the river that will give you an idea of the rest of your journey.
Free shots, pumping music, ridiculously cheap buckets full of alcohol, drinking games, dancing and smoking people...Welcome to tubing! It all looked very funny and surreal at 1 pm, in full day light.
We actually really wanted to start floating but every time we tried to escape that bar, someone came up to us and started talking or begged us to wait for the 'rest of the group'. We definitely weren't part of any group but some courteous American tourists clearly thought otherwise. After a good half hour, we finally managed to grab our tubes and off we went, all excited for our 90 minutes of river fun!
We teamed up with Kris and Kalle, an Irish/Scandinavian couple we had met a couple of days earlier on our Mekong trip and it's definitely 'more people, more happiness' (dixit a Chinese couple that tried to scam us in Shanghai) when you're in the tubes!
So where was I....Oh yeah, 90 minutes of tubing....Forget about that! Only two minutes after our escape from Star Bar (or something like that), we were pulled in by another place of doom. Their 'river bouncers' are throwing a bottle, attached to a string, at you and when you grab it, they pull you into their bar. This time, we had the place all to ourselves and we felt like trying a little game of 'beer pong'. Girls against boys was the original plan, but Kris and I were soon replaced by two six year old girls that were hanging around that place. They were extremely cute and funny to watch but on the other hand, the whole show was a little awkward as well, as these kids seem to spend their days playing around that bar.
By now, I am sure, you have all grasped the idea of tubing: it's just a giant pub crawl along the river and some people don't even bother to rent a tube, they'll just walk from one bar to the other or they'll 'borrow' a tube from tourists that are not paying attention, basically everyone who's drinking. Hence the warning for 'bad tourist people'. Every year people die, as often huge amounts of alcohol and drugs are involved. You will see on one of the pictures what's available in the more dodgy places. Because drinking isn't the only activity on Nam Song. There are trapezes, springboards and zip lines. There is jumping on and off a floating mattress, called The Big Blop and there is a monstrous looking slide that had Benoit all excited and me all freaked out. So you can figure the dangers when all of this is combined with big buckets and opium shakes.
For those who are concerned right now (moms and dads, aunts and uncles....): we enjoyed tubing responsibly and are still alive and well, we returned to our guest house with only a couple of (small) bruises and scratches on our legs and backs.
After we finished most of the activities (I forgot to mention the body painting that only came off after 12 showers) we decided to float back to the tubing station, not realizing it was after 7pm and getting darker faster than expected. This made our last 20 minutes on the river pretty spooky, not being able to see anything around us, silently doubting whether there really weren't any crocodiles in that water.
But we've made it, even though we lost part of our deposits, we were happy to touch land and prove that we were not bad tourist people!
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