A 5hour away town from Vientiane by mini-van, it is a common stop over for travelers going to Luang Prabang, and it became the most popular destination for backpackers — apart from it is surrounded by hilly landscape and lies along Nam Song river, Vang Vieng became popular as Laos’ party town”!
For me, Vang Vieng is either you LOVE it or you HATE it.
Maybe i’m already too old to be irritated with youngsters around who thought having too much is still cool, then I thought of myself when I was younger, yeah I often seek attention too and do stupid things that I thought was cool, so I guess, it’s part of growing up, and perhaps it irritates me now coz i’ve grown mature? Perhaps lol.
But but but, I must say that I liked Vang Vieng very much, I like the caves here much more than Luang Prabang, and most especially, I like the laid back atmosphere around me. It is a place I wanna get lazy and just relax the whole day not just seeing the beauty of it’s nature but enjoying meeting new people or even just plainly people watching at the cozy bars all over the place that most of it shows non-stop marathon episodes of my all-time fave sitcom: Friends 😛 I just love the feeling it gives me and I don’t really mind going back there in the future 🙂
The most popular activity here is the TUBING.
It is floating along the river by just sitting on a “tube” floater usually rented out and most commonly lost or stolen once everyone seems pissed and wasted while floating, there will be pit stops, but these are bars along the river selling beers, liquor and soft drugs (yeah, Laos is part of the Golden Triangle that produces large quantity of opium in the world!). The locals and usually also the bar guests will just throw a rope for you and pull you to their bars, they said if you have been thrown a rope many times, it means you are attractive enough to join their bar, i got “hit” a lot (winks) but it hurts, so it’s not so flattering at all hehe 😛
Famous drinks aside from Beer Lao (world’s cheapest beer!) are the drink buckets, it is so cheap that sometimes they even have free gifts for you — hash or magic mushrooms! These bars play loud music of rnb, hihop and even trance, people go crazy (as expected) and some offers giant slides, swings and diving points which is really dangerous so it is always advised not to try it if you think you can’t handle it. Yearly someone dies, sometimes because of drowning while losing conciousness while tubing.
February is a cold season, so the water is really freezing cold! I got sick for 2 days the day after we went on tubing 🙁
W-ell, whatever it is, it is still so much fun to do tubing! Must try 😉
Hmmm, aside from tubing, there are more other activities you can do there, you can kayak and visit caves like we did! We went to 4 caves and i like the Water Cave the most! It is again tubing going inside the cave but no bars this time hehe, more of stalactites and stalagmites 😛
We forgot to visit the Blue Lagoon! 🙁 another reason for me to go back! No wonder i really wanna stay one day more in VV, but JC and Sandrine were just too nice to convince me to just join them to Phonsavanh 😛
I shall return! 😀
