Vang Vieng

The thought of this town is actually one of the reasons I decided to completely derail my original plan to go west through China. After fall in Russia and Mongolia when the temperatures started to get truly frigid, the promise of floating down a lazy river in the sunshine with a bucket of whiskey and coke was too much to pass up.

The more time I spent in Vietnam, Cambodia, and southern Laos though, the less appealing it got. It's not hard to see how well-trodden this part of the world has become among backpackers. Going to a town that promised an even greater concentration of drunk twenty year old tourists in hippie parachute pants started sounding not so good.

We went anyway. After all, I had to see for myself what the place is like. It turned out to be a small ugly grid of streets lined with Internet cafes, restaurants, and souvenir shops selling the ubiquitous "In the tubing Vang Vieng" shirts you see backpackers wearing all over SE Asia. More and more dull cement guesthouses are under construction and I got the overall impression of an abandoned Soviet resort town overtaken by Laotians unimpressed with foreigners' shenanigans, but willing to take their money.

It is a town that is anything but quaint. For years it's had a borderline legendary reputation for hedonism, and the bars that long ago grew popular for showing a never-ending loop of Friends episodes still play the same show. I don't know why, the show is terrible and outdated. I saw a few places showing Family Guy which is only marginally better, but I guess when you're catering to catatonic Australians that barely have peach fuzz on their chins, you can play whatever crap you want.

The town is, by the way, 80% Australian. It's uncanny.

But the tubing is what put the place on the map, despite plenty of other activities in the surrounding karst peaks, along with the availability of all sorts of technically illegal drugs.

After renting a tube, we were dropped off about 3km upriver, and then walked another few hundred meters to put ourselves in the greatest concentration of bars. It was noon and the sun was shining. The whole place had the look of a third-world river circus. Bars were built on shanty decks over the water, and huge wooden poles had been erected over the water for zip-lines and trapezes. There were water slides and diving platforms, and the river bent around piles of stones that had been dredged up out of landing zones. I can't imagine anything resembling safety regulations existed.

Tubing in Vang Vieng is really a euphemism for bar-hopping by a river. The only time people are in tubes is getting from one place to the next. I had the idea of floating down the river back to town, but we made it only about 200 meters in the course of five hours, and had to get a taxi back to return our tubes by the deadline. Most of our time was spent on the trapezes and slides, and my body was sore the next day from hanging and swinging and hitting the water.

The river was fun, but the scene is so over the top, I don't know how people can survive there more than a few days. We spent a total of four nights there, two going north to Luang Prabang, and two coming back south to Vientiane. I'm glad I went, but I wasn't sad to leave.