Vang Vieng- The mash up capital of Laos

Well.... Im horribly overdue for my turn to update the blog, holding up the whole process some might say....It is just quite hard to back track and write about things that have happened when Im so caught up in what we are doing this exact second, but anywho one must keep it updated if we are to attract millions of readers and get offered a book deal, something along the lines of belle de Jour, but less raunchy.



We arrived in Vang Vieng after the slightly traumatic yet humourous windy bus drive and found a cheap hotel for the four of us and our new buddy Chris... bit of overdue male compainonship for Mike after putting up with us girls constantly rabbiting on 24/ 7. Vang Vieng is a place of contrasts, on one hand it is a beautiful little town with an amazing river and cliffs and on the other it is full of drunken prepubescent australian males given a perfect platform from which to show off.



This showing off takes form in the activity Vang Vieng is best known for... 'tubing'. In short (and I won't go into too much detail as I think everyone should experience this for themselves) you hire a giant tractor inner tube and get a tuk tuk a couple of km's up the road and slowly, leisurely float down the river. The first stop you come to is called 'the organic mojito stop' and this is before you actually get in the water. From here you float down the river and get hauled to the side into different bars where everyone is drinking buckets and beers and dancing etc. There are also giant flying fox swings (showing off). Basically it is the best thing ever.



Anyway we enjoyed the tubing so much we did it again the next day and ended up attempting night tubing. This is not highly recommended. If we had more time I think we would of stayed a LOT longer here. Tess and Mike had their first anniversary while we were here and treated themselves to a night in a place that cost more than 3 dollars and a nice meal. We left Vang Vieng with Chris a little more worse for wear than we arrived and got on the bus to Vientiane, not too shab apart from the lack of airconditioning combined with hangover and loud eye-spy players in the back of the bus.



Im actually going to write about Vientiane also beacause to be fair we didnt really do anything here. Although this is the place where I have had the best pancake so far on the trip. After a bit of investigation we found the only way to feasibly get to cambodia would be to fly. We were aiming for Siem Reap but there were no flights for about a week so flew to Phnom Penh instead. This took us into a whole new class of travellers, and we felt really quite posh.

Right well I almost lost this entire blog so I am just going to publish it before everything goes pearshaped

Clem