Vang Vieng:

February 9th, 2005 - February 13th, 2005

Greetings from the peaceful city of Vang Vieng - it is actually more like a town with one main road and a couple of smaller roads heading down towards the river.

The main 'event' here is tubing down the river in an inner tube and stopping along the way for beer. The 3km trip takes an hour or so in the rainy season to about 5 hours in the dry season. All around town are t-shirts that say "In the Tubing, Vang Vieng, Laos" ... I think they were supposed to say "Inner tubing" instead of "In the Tubing" ... sometimes pronunciation causes confusion here!

Jess and I went tubing on our first day here. We joined up with our buddy John who had been on the slow boat with us and had travelled from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng with us, as well. We also met up with a couple of British girls who we met in the Tuk-Tuk on the way to the drop site.

Basically you pay $3.50 USD per person and you get taken upriver and dumped with your tube in the water. You float downstream rather slowly (this is the dry season) and you stop at various bars that are situated on the riverside. The bars are really just a bamboo platform and a couple crates of Beer Lao and a big sign that says "Beer Lao"! Some offer jumping from platforms or rope swings into the river.

Our tubing experience was pretty good. The more beer we had the more fun it got as there were not many rapids to create other kinds of excitement. We met a lot of people going down the river and it was a nice social time. We were lucky enough to have put on a good brand of sunscreen, because most people were bright red at the end of the day, having floated on a tube for 5 hours in the hot sun.

The following day, we were signed up for a 2-day/1-night trek in the hills around Vang Vieng along with a kayak ride. Jess wasn't feeling well in the morning so she told me to go without here. I joined up with a German couple and our Laos guide, Aeh. We started 15km north of Vang Vieng near a Hmong Village. We hiked up and over a mountain pass stopping in a cave along the way. On the other side of the pass we got to view what the locals call the "Secret Eden" ... it is a huge valley surrounded by mountains on all sides and you can only reach it by hiking.

Following lunch, we hiked out the other side of the valley by going up and over another mountain. This trek quickly became the hardest of all that I have done in SE Asia. We were going up and down steep rock faces unlike any trails I had climbed before.

We finally made it down the hill and near the village where we went to the Water Cave. To enter the cave we had to go on tubes and shimmy along a rope to make our way through the cave which went into the mountain about 500m. We had headlights on so we could see. It was the most exciting of all the caves in the area and a lot of fun.

Near sundown, we reached the village where we were to spend the night. Some locals were playing volleyball on the grass. We joined in the game. At first they were not hitting the ball to me but all of a sudden a free ball floated over the net and I spiked it down on the other teams' best player. All of a sudden one guy goes "Falang Good"!!! Falang is their term for "foreigner" which is similar to the Thai version for "Farang".

We spent the night in the house of some Lao villagers. The village was the nicest I have seen on the trip. It was organized and clean and the people are so friendly. In fact, all the Lao villages I have seen have been like that.

The only problem with villages, of course, is all the animals. We were promptly woken at 4am by the calls of all the roosters in the village. For some reason, they don't wait for sunrise like books I have read suggest. Instead, they wake you up well before sunrise and then continue to keep you awake until you can't take the torture anymore.

At least getting up early had its reward as we got to check out a couple more caves that were not supposed to be part of our trip including Loup Cave. Many of these caves were where Laotians hid during the war so they do have some history behind them.

We started our walk back to towards town and the start of our kayaking trip. I soon realized that while we hiked up and down two mountains to get to the village we stayed in, we could have just walked on a flat road around the mountains to get to it! At least it was more rewarding the way we did it and the scenery more spectacular!

Along the walk we learned from our guide about Lao politics. They have the right to vote, but they only have one party for whom they can vote. So technically it is a democracy because they can vote, but in reality it is not. Hence the official name - People's Democratic Republic of Laos. However, we were told that in the last 10 years the government had done lots to improve the lives of the people and especially the Hmong villagers. Before this time, Hmong villagers used to live in the mountains and clear-cut forests - by burning them down - to create land to farm. In the last 10 years, the government has moved them down to valleys and set up farming and irrigation systems for them.

Anyway, back to the trek. We ended up at the kayak site after an hour and a half walk. It would have been shorter, but Aeh got a little lost along the way. He said he wasn't lost, but I got it out of him later that night over beers that he didn't quite know his way from the village to the kayak site. It was pretty comical.

The kayaking wasn't too exciting. It was down the same slow river that we went tubing on. The only good part was stopping to check out some more caves. We got to go into None Cave, which means sleeping cave, and is another famous cave where people hid during the war. It had several exits, including the narrow one we came out of.

While we were walking out of the cave we started to hear loud explosions. It was a little scary because the noise was vibrating off the mountains around us. They went on for about 10 minutes. Ahe, our guide, explained that it was just the military running practice missions. Yeah, that makes you feel real safe!

By 5pm the trek was over and I returned home battered and bruised (I still hurt today) and found Jess who had recovered from her sickness.

Today is our last day in Vang Vieng before we had to the capital city of Vientiane tomorrow morning via minibus. Vang Vieng, in my opinion, is definitely worth a few days (more if you trek, kayak, or whitewater raft). It is a weird contrast. It is a true backpacker town full of mostly young people (similar to Koh Pha-Ngan in Thailand). However, since it is a good halfway point between Luang Prabang and Vientiane, it is full of older people who come to check it out. I'm sure they are really bored because there is nothing to do here if you don't do some kind of adventure sport. Just walking around town would be boring unless you ate a "Happy" pizza or had "Mushroom" tea... unless they do indulge and us youngsters just don't realize!!!

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