Vang Vieng

Little sleepy Laos, little quiet sleepy Laos…where did it all go wrong!?… When some Westerner probably first stumbled across idylic Vang Vieng having just left Thailand and thought I know lets bring a bit of Western Thai culture to Laos – promptly ruining it!! The setting is stunning, rural farmland scattered with karsts, a river that runs through town, caves and lagoons hidden in small villages just outside of town and so on – it is beautiful! The problem is that it’s now one of the main stopping points in Laos (if not the only one, for most here!) for the younger backpacker (not that I feel old in any way!!!) to come and party – its all about floating down the river in a giant inner tube whilst stopping at riverside bars getting as drunk as possible…now come on only the English or Australians could have come up with that one! Hoardes of kids stagger around the town at anytime of day, inner tube under arm, cuts and bruises to body, drunk inane looks on their faces all thinking that they’re cool! Once the tubing is over it’s off to one of the many bars that line the street to kick back and watch endless episodes of Friends…every bar, back to back, all day! If it wasn’t for the pumping techno music late at night you’d leave town with the Friends theme tune firmly in your head. To avoid the masses on our one and only day in town we hired bicycles and headed out into the surrounding countryside, which is really lovely, cycling along dirt roads around the villages. As pretty and idylic as these villages are at one point we had a slight scare when we were confronted by about 10 teenagers on bikes all wielding big machettes and knives…not an everyday sight and my first thoughts were that not only have they adopted the pub culture, they now also have ASBO teenagers running riot in villages mugging foreigners! Ok, so this wasn’t quite the case, they all shouted hello and rode off laughing – must have had a double lesson in knife skills at school that afternoon then!! Needless to say this wasn’t our favourite place…yep we had a nice riverside hut, yep we went for a lovely bike ride out in the countryside, yep we even watched an episode of Friends…the one where Chandler…ok maybe not! But still it is all kinda ruined by what the place has become, but hey we went, we saw and we didn’t buy the t-shirt…unlike every other bugger in town wandering around in their ‘Tubing Vang Vieng’ t-shirt with complimentary bandages!!