Today was the day for tubing which, besides hiking and rock-climbing is the major tourist attraction in this town. At breakfast we met up with Ali who also wanted to go tubing so we arranged to meet at the tube hire shop at 1.30pm.
Took a tuk-tuk home to get our swimmers and leave any valuables behind (well nearly all our valuables of course Grahame took his expensive prescription sunglasses and lost them. He also lost his cool Bandana not once but twice after he retrieved it off the head of a local kid he managed to lose it again but the expensive sunnies were never seen again) and then it was straight back into town where we also met up with Josephine an American who lives in India (Jo & Ali if you are reading this send us an email to tracey.lonergan@thecru.com.au and let us know how you ended up!).
It is all very organised – your tube hire includes a tuk-tuk ride (crammed with 10 people and 10 giant truck tubes) upstream to the first bar on the riverbank. Here you get stuck into your first bucket of alcohol for the day! It goes downhill from here as you can imagine! Basically there are bars all the way down the Nam Song river for about a km and you float/paddle your tube from bar to bar where the bar staff throw you a rope to reel you into their bars with enticement of free shots; food, slides and flying foxes. By the second bar we were attacking the flying foxes with gusto and downing shots made from scorpions, snakes and hornets. It was the greatest fun although at the end it was getting quite dark and was probably very dangerous as we were flying off slides about 10m above the river where they would throw you up in the air and just drop you in the river. Luckily for us we had heaps of alcohol in our system to deal with the pain of that last landing!
I could barely crawl back up the ladder to retrieve my tube and decided that was enough bravado for one day. Around 6pm it was quite dark so we dragged ourselves out of the river at a bridge and waited for a tuk-tuk (they have radar) to find us and take us back into town. If you didn’t stop at the bars then you could probably float all the way into town in only a couple of hours but that is not the point of tubing on the Nam Song (Song River).
We went out for dinner with some newly acquired young friends. We spent about $10 aussie on food and did not pay for any alcohol all night. In fact everybody on our table did not pay for anything unless it was bottled beer, they kept on giving us free shots and vodka all night! I am not sure how they actually make money by giving so much away for free.
Thavisouk Guesthouse, Vang Vieng
http://www.laophanthaongtour.com/ ph: 023 511340/511124 (80,000 kip w hot water and fan)
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