We stayed at the Grand View Guesthouse and it really had grand views. Also, it was a top quality room with hot water, TV with a couple of movie channels, a strong fan, great bed and as a cherry on the top, a massive balcony facing the river and the mountains. All this for nine euros per night. Here's some views from the balcony:
Last year I met some wonderful people in Vang Vieng, but this time we felt all too old for the place. May is already off-season for Laos, although the rainy season is only about to start, so there were not that many people about. Usually that's a good thing, but in Vang Vieng it seemed to mean that only the people most desperate to keep partying remained. Many of the restaurants and bars stood empty, and the ones that were popular were crowded with all too festive (drunk) revellers.
Vang Vieng during the day. The yellow Beer Lao advertisements are about the only ones you see in communist Laos. They're rather ugly, but very handy in the countryside as even the tiniest road-side restaurants have one.
Tubing is truly a fun activity, but the trouble on the river are the numerous bars offering free drinks. So most of the people go "tubing" just to get drunk cheaply in the middle of the day and party in the sunshine. The bars employ backpackers as party hosts and hostesses, whose main duty is to get people to buy more drinks by playing drinking games and having a laugh with them. A proper Vang Vieng riverside bar is not complete without a table for beer ping pong and someone offering to body paint rude words on you.
Furthermore, some of the bars have ziplines, slides or jumping platforms into the river. However, many of these are not safe during the dry season when the water is low, or when jumping to the wrong direction. Intoxicated people tend to think that if it is possible to jump into the water, it must be safe. To make the situation even worse, some of the bars have "happy menus" offering weed, magic mushrooms and opium... as if the free shots of local whiskey wouldn't already be lethal enough. According to a local restaurant keeper, 22 backpackers died in Vang Vieng in 2011, and about ten had died in 2012 by mid-May. Not a very happy statistic.
Anyhow, we spent two lovely days tubing. First time we had a couple of free shots and managed to get only halfway through before the sun started setting and took a tuk-tuk home. In the tuk-tuk we met a guy who had lost his camera on the river... at the exactly same spot where his friend lost his camera two days earlier. Apparently there is a spot in the river that is very dangerous to cameras! Acknowledging this risk, we took ours with us on our second tubing trip, so here's some photos:
Tubing trip starts from here. Tube rental costs about six euros for a day, and includes a tuk-tuk ride 4 km upstream from Vang Vieng. You also have to pay deposit that you will get back if you return the tube by 6 pm (8 pm) the same day. The tube rental shop is apparently run by the surrounding villages in co-operation - each local village gets a turn to run it making sure the money from tourists spreads evenly in the area.
Some of the riverside bars at the tubing drop-off point. Still very quiet, as it's only noon. Notice the high jumping platform.
Dr Pepper tubing in the stunning views, and more riverside bars with slides and zip-lines on the right. The river water was rather brown and murky (unlike last time) due to the first rains of the season just a week earlier. The rain water drains all the dust and dirt from surrounding areas into the river.
I think Boyfriend was a bit disappointed with Vang Vieng and the lack of more mature backpackers. We had met so many nice people to hang out with in Laos that Vang Vieng with its under-20 party crowd felt a bit lonely and distant to us. On our last full day in Vang Vieng we woke up annoyed around 5 am to our upstairs neighbours being drunk, loud and annoying on their balcony for hours. We considered leaving from Vang Vieng straightaway, but an early morning walk in rainy and quiet Vang Vieng changed our mind about it. The town was much lovelier without the drunk and misbehaving backpackers, and the rainy morning offered exactly this to us.
Later in the day we rented a moto and explored the area around Vang Vieng, and it's a shame we didn't do it earlier as there is plenty of real Laos to see.The small roads go through villages and fields, and for people interested in climbing in caves, there are many of those. The most tourists seem to head to the Blue Lagoon when doing a trip in the surroundings, but I didn't find it so special -maybe it's more for people with a tendency to jump into water whenever possible. Also the cave above it felt too dangerous to go in after the first twenty metres. However we enjoyed seeing the village life everywhere around us; women weaving, men fishing, people on the fields, children returning from the school, people coming home from the market. Also we met a delightful restaurant owner who happily shared his story of life as well as his insights into local politics. All in all, the late afternoon we spent motoing around made us much feel much happier about Vang Vieng as a destination.
So the following day we left from Vang Vieng and Laos, and we were quite sad to go. We could've easily spent more time in the country, but our flights back home were looming in already four days! From Vang Vieng we took a minivan to Vientiane (what a suitable place to have a lunch in!), then the Laos's only operating train from Vientiane over the Friendship Bridge to Nong Khai in Thailand, and from there a hyper-airconditioned sleeper train to Ayutthaya. None of the ticketing people seemed to think that we could buy a ticket to Ayutthaya instead of Bangkok, but getting there was easily sorted by informing the conductors that we'd like to get off in Ayutthaya instead of Bangkok.
(c) to all photos by Boyfriend.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please comment respecting our anonymity