Tubing in Vang Vieng...

After a long and bumpy journey from Vientiane (Shell went green at one point) we touched down in Vang Vieng, apprehensive about what the following days may bring in this part of the world. Strangely, even though we are still firmly in our twenties, doing some of the things that people get up to in Vang Vieng just seemed completely beyond us, I think mainly because we come as a couple but also because we aren't eighteen and on a 'gap year man' from University. You get a lot of these. In reality, we should never have worried, maybe misplaced apprehension?

Arriving in Vang Vieng, we were almost immediately steered towards accommodation in the centre of town that despite the risk of being criminally noisy throughout the night would set us back no more than £5 per night. After getting grips with the town we spent the first of our days indoors as I unfortunately regained a similar stomach bug that I first encountered in Bali, falling just short of the 'Shell, am I going to die' feeling that I had two months ago! This time, the constant diarrhea would just mean that a day spent in our hotel room watching HBO for 13 hours straight would just give us an excuse to watch seven movies back to back (Mean Machine, Red, Trading Places, The Invention of lying, Extraordinary Measures, You Don't know Jack and Four Christmases!), much needed after nearly three weeks of being constantly on the move.

The next day we rose early enough and headed straight out for breakfast before paying our money for a our tubes before heading, with four guys from Tasmania, down to the start of the Tubing bar mile! As you stroll across the flimsy wooden bridge to the first bar you instantly get the feeling that this is something slightly more manic than even Friday night along Albert Road in Southsea. True, the predictable but inaudible sound of the local mush isn't found but is replaced by the incoherent screams of a group of girls all vying to bounce their ping pong ball in a glass of beer placed on the next table (it's not what you think). This 'bar' on the side of the river, was packed to the rafters with people playing drinking games, necking whiskey, jumping up and down to trance music and generally enjoying the free alcohol and sun mixture. We bought our first beers, sat down on one of the bamboo rafts that double for dancing podiums and started to take in our first experience of Vang Vieng's famous Tubing. You couldn't help but be sucked in.

You see, all you want to do in these situations is completely let go, and this you do, that's why you spend the day drinking, dancing and meeting the kind of people you only used to see on 'Ibiza Uncovered'. The thing is though, however much you try to fight it, you can't help but see things from a sociological perspective, to sit there, beer in hand, watching these people of maybe thirty different nationalities having the time of their lives. Although mainly alcohol induced, these people all respond to each other and their surroundings in such different ways. It's great to watch and even better to be a part of as you sit their in the scorching sun, surrounded by verdant forest, dramatic karsts and raised bamboo dancefloors populated by people of all ages gyrating to New York techno. In a way, it's hard to imagine a more surreal sight, try to remember the helicopter scene in Apocolypse Now with Marlon Brando and you'll have some idea.

Although firmly entrenched as part of the South-East-Asia backpacker rights-of-passage, it nevertheless conjours up images of mystical hedonism in it's purest form, maybe somewhere Indiana Jones would find at the bottom of steep ravine only for it to be populated by four guys from Coventry wearing fluorescent paint, on their nipples. It's a strange one, something that if your not fully prepared for, can in some ways intimidate. In other respects though, as long as you take it all with a firm pinch of salt, can be one of the last vestiges of pure, unadulterated hedonism that if were placed in the UK, maybe somewhere downstream on the Thames, would be closed down in about, well, four and a half minutes.

Jumping on the tube we sailed downstream for all of twenty-five seconds before a plastic bottle tied to a massive length of rope came hurtling towards us so we could grasp hold and be winched in to the next bar. This one called, synonymously, the Bucket Bar. After being 'made' to down shots of whiskey by a couple of guys we were then told to tie headbands around our head which we duly stuck on without noticing what was written on them. Sorry mum and sorry Linda but mine read 'I got fucked in the Bucket Bar for 10,000 kip' and Shells' read 'I got fucked by Justin Bieber.....in the Bucket Bar', classy...

In the end we stayed in there for most of the afternoon, watching the loons dive off a bamboo tower into the river below, intermittently being made to down some whiskey and then hopping off to play volleyball on a batch of sand after being rounded up by a crazy Canadian girl (pesky Canadians) who insisted on calling everyone by the country they were from (she hated first names apparently). God help the guy from The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia....

Anyway back on the river we bobbed around for a while before passing various other bars before deciding as we had no clue of the time we would ride the current all the way back into town where we would hand back our tubes to collect our deposits. On the way back to the hotel we popped into a bar for food where, as a ferocious storm rolled in, the opening of The Smiths 'There is a Light that Never Goes Out' came through the speakers. I know it's tourists a town but sat here, in a bar in the middle of Laos, after a day spent drinking whiskey in the sun, watching lightning bright up the night sky, and without trying to sound like Pop Larkin... things just couldn't be any more perfict....