In Vang Laos the tubing Vieng

And so to Vang Vieng, another riverside beauty, this one famous for booze buckets, mushroom shakes, “happy” pizzas and bars showing endless Friends and Simpsons DVDs to monged backpackers. We decided to take this place with a pinch of salt. But while the town centre might be a 19-year-old gap year kid’s wet dream, all inviting bars and grammatically incorrect souvenir vests, the rickety bamboo bridge transports you into another world, a gleaming green village inhabited by giant butterflies, kittens and smiley fisherfolk. Over there, everything smells of baby cows.

The monsoon well and truly arrived in Vang Vieng, so each night we picked our way cautiously across the slippery bridge and along the gooey bank in the moonlight while flashy storms raged, giving the Nam Song river a much needed drink.

The other thing Vang Vieng is famous for is tubing. You hire an old tractor inner-tube, jump in and float down the river, stopping at various riverside bars to drink and play on immense rope swings, slides and mud pits. It sounds like hell, but it’s not. We’d found Aimee, Rick, Audrey and Herman again, from the trek, so we faced the blaring music and frightening rope swings together, got tipsy, rolled around in the mud then floated on down the river back to town admiring the view. It were grand.


A couple of days later we went back for more, this time starting further up river with kayaks, exploring caves along the way. The caves were a bit of a disaster. We were just strapping giant torches to our heads and climbing into the tubes we would float into the first watery cave in when we heard an almighty banging sound. It sounded an awful lot like bombs so when the Lao guides yelled RUN, we ruddy well ran for our lives like mad people, thinking of all the unexploded American bombs sitting around Laos waiting to go off. But it was “just” an enormous rock tumbling down the mountain and crash-landing at the cave’s entrance. A minute later and someone would have been under that rock. “That’s never happened before,” a guide mused. Needless to say I waited outside the cave playing with ducklings while some brave souls went in.

Kayaking was fun though. The sky clouded over and there was a huge thunderstorm; we learnt what Forrest Gump meant by “Little bitty stingin' rain... and big ol' fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.” And then we capsized.