Vang Vieng xperience

The diarrhea followed me to Vang Vieng - the once peaceful place for random backpackers to spend the chillest time of their live; now somewhat noisy place, an excuse for bad behaviour for many young semi-backpackers and packet travellers. Here in the streets of Vang Vieng one might catch a girl in her twenties running around just in her bikinis and flip-flops drunk or possibly on drugs. Locals mix in the streets with westerners. The village centre in the evening time – even though very lively – is not impossibly noisy. A lot of people are chilling out in the restaurants/bars just staring TV (The Friends, The Family Guy). I have to admit, the latter TV-show was not that bad.. :). But I watched it only once for a half an hour whilst eating. The noisiest place here in Vang Vieng must be the beginning part of the tubing route. More of that later.

We’ve been eating a lot of western food here. This has suited me because A) the western food here is relatively well-made (compared to a lot of other places we’ve visited); e.g. a pizzeria here called Milan is quite nice – they even have a wooden oven for baking the pizzas. A hamburger had an actual lehtipihvi (a thin non-minced chunk of beef meat) inside it. Chicken with mushroom sauce was excellent. And all this meat eating does not bother me here so much, because I see everywhere chickens, cows running about freely, which would imply they lead quite happy lives. I hope it is this stuff we are eating.. Heh, the cows are every now and then blocking eveng the highways and cars have to evade them (we actually had to evade them with the motorcycles we rented). Chickens (or roosters actually) wake us up every morning as early as 3 a.m. to their cocka-doodle-doos.

We are staying at a hostel called Phaserdsay, a relatively peaceful and cheap hostel in the village centre, in a backalley. We pay a bit over 3 euros for a clean private two bed room. The shower though does not seem to function in the evenings which is not so nice, but for this price it’s more than mkay. So far we’ve had one bad night here when some – according to her hollering – drugged chick came back to her room (which is beside ours) and just shouter, screamed and cried (probably saw some hallucinations of people stabbing her with drugs) for 1½ hours. A guy then decided to bang our door twice, and after enquiring the reason for this, I read between the lines, he was not happy about us not coming out and seeing what was going on. OK, maybe I should have gone out to check what the girl was crying about, but as I heard it was a drug-related thing and also heard the guys trying to calm her down, I figured why the hell would I then be needed. Anyways, after she shut up, some Swedish group of bimboes started their infernal Swedish right under our window. And after they shut up, a rooster started making its every day routine. Saatanan kukko!

The activities here have been plentiful. Apart from my diarrhea, which now seems to be receding thanks to yesterday’s chillest of chillest tubing (ok a coupla imodium tabs might have helped as well), I have been having great time. It is not as bad as I feared, because I had heard Vang Vieng has just become another packet tourist resort (not quite, but almost..) for people with too much money but too little age as well (meaning teens or bozos who just want to get wasted every day at the expense of the local people’s mental health). There are a lot of good places in Vang Vieng.

Aside from having several wonderful Lao massages we have been doing much in Vang Vieng in relatively short time. On Saturday we rented motorcycles (manual gears) for a bit over 3$ a day. If we broke something we would of course pay for it. Gasoline was quite cheap and as it turned out, we paid for too much gasoline, we could not use it all in the end. It was cheap anyway. We first traveled in the countryside where there are a lot of caves. First cave was on the far side of a rice field, called “Tiger Cave”, where a little boy (cunningly, it cost us something) lead us to the cave entrance, which was well hidden, and guided us through it. We had our flashlights and the cave had lot of weird stalactite formations and hollow rocks (sounded like drums when tapping ‘em). From time to time the cave was so narrow we had to crawl our way forward (I have a bit of claustrophobism in me but I could withstand it), some points jumping from a rock to rock and watching out not to fall to our demise. It was my first touch to real caving a la the movie “Descent” and it was very exciting and a bit scary at the same time! It was pitch black without lights, the air was humid and weird, like what I would imagine a tomb-air would be like. It was hot. After the Tiger Cave we traveled further and stopped at another cave, this time not taking the tour guide but trusting our own guidance. It went well, even though one had to be careful not to fall into holes from which there would be no way back. Finally we ended up with our motorcycles to Tham Poukham cave – a massive, huge cave system with majestic looking glimmering stalactites everywhere. There was also a laying Buddha inside there. I was just jumping from rock to rock there with my cell phone lamp, it was quite risky as there was really deep holes in the ground. Fortunately there were lot of tourists there so we could wander around and behind them to guide us through with their guides. Outside the cave there was a beautiful and serene lagoon – a river with a tree from where one could jump down or hang on to a rope and swing around. The weather was nice and not too many people were there so it was good times. Some basking in the sun and the water and that was it. As we had so much gas left we decided to head to the highway 13 that is going past Vang Vieng. We started to drive back towards Luang Prabang with amazingly beautiful scenery, mountains passing by on the left side as the sun was setting down and blinking in between the mountain peaks..so relaxing. My wheels reached a maximum on 90 km/h speed, which was decent and kinda adrenaline-increasing, because we had only helmets on in addition to normal pants and t-shirt. We visited an organic farm (unbelievable!) down at the highway. It serves organic food and it really tasted like it – extremely good and nutritious. The farm also expressed its concern towards the noise pollution coming from the river beside the farm – this river is the one where tubing occurs. They mentioned that this noise is not good for the locals (bars playing all the latest (s)hit music overdriving the speakers, lot of drunken westerners making noise..) and it gives bad examples for the children. This is true and I think the Lao people should seriously do something about this, maybe by introducing some laws or such.

On Sunday we decided to go for the so much talked tubing. We took an early start and it proved out to be a perfect idea. We were already on our tubes starting our trip down the river at 10 a.m. when the sun was just about to warm properly. Right there maybe 50 meters from the starting point there’s a multitude of bars on both sides of the river where the “doormen” throw ropes with bottles attached to the end for you to make you enter the bar. We spent some time in the “bar III” just sunbathing and doing the incredibly fun swing. There’s a swing maybe 10 meters above the water level and you can just jump down from a platform by holding on to this swing, do the pendulum movement and let go when the time is right for you. There were lot of rocks surrounding the landing area and due to the dry season in Lao, water level was not that high in the river. As a result one really had to watch out where to land. For us it was no problem but for the drunken masses I figure and have also heard that many people injure themselves seriously when falling onto the rocks. It’s called natural selection. One of the bands that is used to tow the swing back up wrapped itself around Silja’s hand when we were doing the swing twosome and it sliced my and Silja’s hand, making some burn marks. Silja had it worse and is now wearing a bandage on her hand. The person controlling the band (there has to be always a person there) did not apparently know what she was doing. We continued our chill and slow flowing down the river. We stopped at probably the best bar on the river. Mud bar it was called. We did not drink or eat there anything but the music was fabulous to my taste. Progressive very groovy electronic banging. And there was this German guy who used to be a pro-dj (before went to work to Dubai, earning 5000€ net income, free living and transportation) and he was doing the decks there, he played so well. The bar owner immediately cut some deal with him. Not bad. The music was just the right stuff for my stomach. The sun, the music, people smiling and going down from a swing (I tried it as well, I hit the bottoms of my feet to the river floor when coming down, so not too deep there :) ). We ate some fish’n’chips in the bar next to mud bar and continued our flow. By accident we bumped into a Finnish group of three people: Olli, Kaisa (from Turku) and Jaana (originally from Vaasa, now in Helsinki). The chill flow continued with chatting to them, stopping to some bars with them and having some drinks and some Luang Prabangese herbs. Everywhere in the bars we were offered something like super happy drinks or hash brownies but we invariably refused from them as we heard they might be doing scams and would result us in having to pay hundreds of dollars of fines of having some mushrooms. The river end bit was quite long and we really had to paddle hard to keep moving forward. But there were not so many bars anymore so it was very relaxing. At 5 p.m. we reached Vang Vieng. With the Finnish posse we went to a restaurant and after that to some bars. I had some Lao whisky. It was…good. We played good drinking games – something which I would show back in Finland :). Well, nice night. The Finnish posse continued the next day to the southernmost part of Laos – the 4000 islands.

On Sunday we booked a 25 dollar trip for Monday. A trip for some rock climbing. And on Monday we did it. It was so interesting trip and fun as well. Now I at least understand the basics of this sport: how to make the knot to your waist, how the whole climbing procedure is done, how to be the guy on the ground who makes sure the climber does not die if she happened to loose the grip while on the way up. I always liked climbing when I was young – we climbed a lot with my big brother and his friend Jukka in all places. But this time we had safety on so it was pretty easy.. no :) it was very labourious. The highest we climbed was about 20 meters and the rock was limestone so it had a good grip because of its rugged surface and many places to hold on to. We had good climbing shoes they had very good grip. For me climbing is easier in some way because I have long limbs so I can reach places more easily. The last ascent was the hardest one and really took the juices out from us. Fortunately our guide always could instruct us where to put our feet or hands. The feeling when you are up all tired and pushed yourself to the limits is beyond the scope of natural language. For my last ascent Silja was the person keeping me safe down on the ground level and especially when descending down the climber has to rely on the person down to make a safe descent (the person on the ground gives rope more and more to make the climber come down. If the rope would tear at this point it would R.I.P. Fortunately we came out alive.

Today we will head out for the chillest capital in Asia, Vientiane by a bus. There we will chill out beside the river Mekong and maybe see something..and then on Friday we will fly to Bangkok for several days until making our way through to the southern Thailand, the islands of Koh Samui, Pha Ngan and Tao.