Vang Vieng & Vientiane

Vang Vieng


We met some people on the mini bus here and ended up staying at the same guest house. We had arrived late afternoon so quick change then we all went out to eat.  Went in the first place we came across which happened to be the bucket bar where they give you a free bucket of whisky cocktail with every 2 meals.  Vang Vieng is very touristy and people only really go there to get drunk and go tubing so there is a lot of very drunk tourists staggering around in the evenings, but its hard to stay sober when the bars are giving buckets away.  After a couple more buckets and a few games of pool we headed back to the guest house.

The next day we met up with the others and walked to the river to join the rest of the tourists tubing for the day.  Tubing is basically drifting down the river in an inner tube of a tracktor tyre. We got our tubes then got driven a couple of miles up the river and droped off.  We had about 5 hours to drift back to the start. But when tubing in's all about swinging and sliding and drinking. To be honest we didn't really need the tube to get from bar to bar and we probably nly made it 500m on the tube in 5 hours. The day was mostly spent swinging on massive rope swings and drinking in the sun with 100's of other "falang". We made it back to the tube station via a tuk tuk which we got from the place they had dropped us off 5 hours ealier. Tubing is great! The next day we both felt a little sore and decided to chill out so headed off to a litle bar and watched some friends. Friends to Vang Vieng is like octopussy for Udaipur, its played everywhere on-loop all day. The next day we caught a bus to Vientiane.

Vientiane

Well there wasn't much good said by other travellers about this city and we had only planned on visiting to break our journey while heading south to Tha Kheak. We had a little walk around the centre and down the Mekong but as expected there was little to do or see. The next day we boarded a proper VIP bus to Tha Kheak where we planned on visiting Kong Lo cave. The journey was good and we made it to the town outskirts about 7pm. There seems to be a little system going on between the bus drivers and the tuk tuks, they seem to drop you off in strange locations where there's always a tuk tuk or 2. Anyways after another 30 mins we made it to a little Guest house near the river front. We had come to Tha Kheak to do the loop.