Vang Vieng, Laos

We departed Luang Prabang December 29 by minivan. They told us 6 hours, but in Laos, every thing takes so much longer! 12 Falangs packed into a minivan on the "paved" "highway" where max speed through the windy and mountainous part is about 30 mph. Unfortunately, we were stuck with an obnoxious group of early 20-something Americans in our van. Wow, we never really realized how obnixous North Americans can be (we're positive we were extremely pleasant to be around when we were that age)! Anyways, Vang Vieng is one of the party capitals of Southeast Asia. It is a very beautiful place, full of adventures like hiking, kayaking, mountain biking, rock climbing, and tubing. Tubing???? Like down the Apple River???? It's also a place where you can buy alot of drugs and beer-lao. Anyways, after about 7.5 hours of windy road driving, our minivan breaks down (overheats) about 5 km from Vang Vieng. Luckily it wasn't 5 hours outside of town, like the V.I.P. bus we saw on the side of the road a few hundred kilometers back. Another bus came to get us in no time, then we all piled into a tuk-tuk for a ride to town to find a hotel.



We decided to splurge a little, and spent about $40 USD (including breakfast and HBO channel) for a nice hotel overlooking the limestone cliffs and the Nam Song (Nam means river). Emily caught a bad sore throat/cold, and luke was also feeling under the weather so it was nice to relax in a nice place.

On New Years Eve, we rented tubes for tubing. This is something that supposedly everyone has to do if they come to Vang Vieng. It is a party on the river, with many bars with rope swings and slides into the river. We got a late start, departing at 3:30pm after eating lunch at the organic mulberry farm, so we had to just cruise through the drunken debauchery to get back by 6pm or face a $2 late fee......

This was the scene from the tubes, a beach bar complete with platform with a zip line into the water. Apparently there are many accidents, such as bruises, broken bones, etc. from drunken kids landing badly in the water. We can't imagine what tubing would be like in the rainy season, because it would be pretty rough water in a tube.

We had really good scenery. Here is Luke floating by the limestone cliffs.

We came across a family in their tractor trying to cross the river. This is a pretty common site.

The next day we rented halfway decent Giant mountain bikes (that didn't fall apart on us and kind of shifted into more than 1 gear) and biked up to some caves.


Many of the caves have buddha statues in them. You can see this one of a buddha lying down (gold color).

Another popular pastime in Vang Vieng is the "Friends Bars". We read about it in our crappy Lonely Planet Guidebook, but didn't really believe it until we saw it. They have Friends reruns on TV all day and night, and people sit on couches eating really bad western food and watch all day. Pretty pathetic!

We enjoyed some nice sunsets from our balcony overlooking Nam Song. One night, about a mile or two away, we saw huge clouds of hundreds of thousands of bats flying in the sky. We read that this can occasionally be seen around sunset as the bats leave the caves to go out and dine at night. Pretty awesome.

We have been getting fresh fruit shakes and juice daily. Here is Emily in front of a shake bar. Look at all the choices!