TRAVELMAN LAOS: VANG VIENG IS A WHISKEY RIVER FOR BACKPACKERS

travelman (60)in #writing • 7 years ago (edited)

On the morning I was to be picked up to leave town, I waited at the hostel where I'd booked my bus ticket. While I sat there, I was kind of wishing I'd chosen to stay at that hostel during my time in Vang Vieng. It seemed like a nice place. They had fun phrases written on slats of wood hanging above the bar/check-in counter. This was one of them...

I think Vang Vieng may want to use this as their tourism slogan. Here's why...

I took the same mini-van as Abbie, Hollie, and Lizzie from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. We rode through some tall mountains, it was a bumpy ride. We arrived in town around seven and followed Abbie's Mapsme to the hostel we'd booked.

It had a big, open lobby with an old snooker table in the center of the room. I learned it was a snooker table from Abbie, and we subsequently learned that SIr Neville Chamberlain was one of its inventors.

The lobby was packed with backpackers, the music was pumping, and things were getting crazy. Cuz see, they had free whiskey every night for two hours at this particular fine establishment.

The group of five British girls were staying there. They'd arrived a day ahead of us. Three of them ran up to me and excitedly gave me a group hug. I told Abbie that this happens to me all the time when I arrive in a new town. Yeah, it's a cross I must bear.

We got ourselves checked into our rooms and came back out to join the party. We poured ourselves some free whiskey and sat with the five Brits. One of them told us a harrowing story of the tubing ride they'd gone on.

Tubing on the Nam Song River is one of the popular tourist activities. You get in a tube on the river, thirty seconds later you get out and drink at inflated prices at a makeshift bar on the side of the river for an hour or two. Then you get back in the river for five minutes, catch a line that is thrown out to you so you don't get swept past the second bar, go to that bar, buy more alcohol at inflated prices, get back in the river drunk, and float to an end point that is not clearly marked. Many people miss it, many people stay too late at the bar and end up on the river in the dark. And, oh, many people have died doing it.

The Brit told her story of being lost in the dark, crawling out of the river, climbing a barbed wire fence, cutting her leg, and flagging down a tuk tuk. Abbie and I ended up taking the journey two days later because a lot of people said it was fun. It was one of my least favorite afternoons of my journeys.

Here's Abbie and I enjoying the fine libations of Vang Vieng...

Around the time we finished our second drink, the administrator of the hostel, a young Laotian man stood on the snooker table and impressed the backpackers with a couple magic tricks involving popping balloons and revealing the sum of the random numbers random backpackers had shouted out. Then happy hour was over and the entire place headed to a bar a few hundred feet down the street that, guess what, had free whiskey for an hour. We ran into about ten more people we'd met on the boat and partied deep into the night.

The following night I treated myself to an expensive room (twenty USD) with a view of the mountains and the river. Hollie and Lizzie moved to a cheap boutique hotel, and Abbie remained at the hostel because she'd already reserved the bed and would lose her deposit.

Here's my room. I ended up staying there for the next three nights because I couldn't separate myself from the view and the king sized bed...

On the last afternoon in Vang Vieng, the damned hottest afternoon of our stay, Hollie, Lizzie, Abbie, and I rented some bikes and rode out to the Blue Lagoon number one. Abbie and I had been there the previous afternoon and had found the ride there and back in the tuk tuk to be the best part of the excursion.

On the road to the Blue Lagoon, a popular tourist attraction and swimming hole (there's also a cave there), the road rolls gently, cutting through farmers' fields, past cows grazing on the side of the road, cows moseying down the road, wagons full of crops, farmers carrying thin stalks of wood strapped to their backs in a bundle. children riding their bikes home from school, houses raising their chickens, their cows, and goats, and the limestone mountains provide a backdrop to a cornucopia of vivid green, yellow, and brown fields. It's a journey that can only be described in one, long, breathless, run-on sentence.

Once again, I didn't take all that many pictures. Damn it was hot that day! ...But you know, beer IS fried chicken. !!!
(Refer to my last post for and explanation)

I spotted these mudflaps on the truck in front of my mini-van on the way to Vientiane. Look closely, that's Al Pacino as Serpico (A great movie from the seventies). How completely random!