Tubing in Vang Vieng!!!

We just had one of the craziest days on our trip: tubing in Vang Vieng!!

For anyone who has been there before, yes it is still craziness and for those who haven't and who like to party, it is AWESOME!! To the young backpacker crowd, this place is a rite of passage and the party tone is set early on in the day. Colin and I were definately above the average age (most kids were Brit gap year-ers or Aussies on holiday) but we still had fun. The day consists of riding a tube down the river, while stopping off at bars along the way. These aren't normal bars though, these are makeshift shanty bars which also provide homemade swings, zip lines, slides and a whole amusement park worth of homemade contraptions to entice the drunken tubers.

The day went like this...
After a lazy breakfast, all the backpackers descend on one of two inner-tube rental shops who quickly take your money, make you sign a waiver and then whisk you off to the inner-tube launch site. When you arrive at the launch, a nice lao-lao (homemade whisky) shooter is waiting for you. Before you even launch your tube, you can stay and have some drinks at Bar 1. At Bar 1, they have a homemade trapeze set up and anyone can attempt to be an acrobat for FREE. Colin and I chose to do our acrobatics before we drank too many 1$ 650ml beer laos. It was a riot!! No injuries for us...You could also get a bucket of anything you might fancy for about $4 (Vodka Redbull, Lao-Lao and coke, etc.). After a few more beer laos and even a bucket of Vodka Redbull, we decided the swings were so much fun that we had to try again. This time I had a bit of a side flop and some mild bruising...oops. Our final 'ride' was further down the river...it was a giant homemade slide. It looked amazing!! When I got to the top, I noticed it was all tiled and I thought perhaps it would scratch me all over the place. Luckily it didn't. However it did shoot me off the bottom like a canon! Take a look at the videos...looking at them now makes us feel a bit stupid but hey, EVERYONE WAS DOING IT!! Oh, and there were little Laos children flying all over the place. There were 5 year olds in their undies doing backflips off all the trapezes!!



Miss you all,
P & C