Vang Vieng, Laos - 21/22 November 2008

The journey up to Vang Vieng was longer than expected, as our bus broke down and appeared to lose a couple of gears, seemed like 1st or 2nd was missing. After a few girls had words with the driver, he reluctantly stopped for a toiler break, in the middle of nowhere, he seemed to enjoy the 'farang' (foreigners) splitting up into the bushes and returning to nature. It was rather amusing.

We managed to find our bungalows easily, they were really cute wooden bungalows along the river banks, ours only got finished being built last week. Vang Vieng is a tiny town set along the Mekong river, surrounded by enormous limestone cliffs. It is sort of a halfway house between Vientiane & Luang Prabang and home to lots of backpackers. Food there was really cheap & really good! The main street is full of bars & restaurants playing reruns of Friends episodes at full blast, very bizarre. On our first night we succumbed and lay down at our table / bed at Pop restaurant and ate our dinner whilst watching a few episodes.

We booked a full day tour for the following day, we visited and local village, went tubing through an underwater cave before kayaking 18km downstream back to Vang Vieng. We met some very cool girls from north London in the middle of a 7 month trip, we are definately amateurs compared to some of these guys!

The only downside, we thought, being old & stuff was about 3km before town, the tubing run into town starts & a whole bunch of riverside bars have popped up playing loud commercial music and full of travellers getting pissed on beer lao before tubing into town. It kinda ruins the whole innocence of the place. Still they have some awesome zip lines, water slides and swings into the river. Of course there was little respect for health & safety so it was at your own risk, I managed to land rather painfully face first into the water after flying 10m through the air off the slide. You have to see the pics to see the size of that bad boy.

We were due to leave for Luang Prabang the next day but considered staying an extra day as we fell in love with this place, but in the end decided to stick to our plan & booked the mini bus up to LP...the route which takes 6 hrs sounds less than pleasant, so fingers crossed.

Had a really nice dinner at some random non-friends bar, I had a monster whole fish out of the river on the barbie(£2) and Jacqui finally managed to get a non spicy yellow curry(£1.50), ooooh and an amazing peanut & milo shake. Am so excited to rediscover milo, you forget how many things from SA you don't get in London.

Whilst waiting for our bus the next day we bumped into our swedish friends who went up to LP & were now spending half a day in VV before a 16hr bus ride to Bangkok...rather them than us!