Vang Vieng

Well the last two days have been fun in an odd sort of way.  Yesterday I went down to the river with a whole bunch of travellers and generally we all pretty much sat around, ate, swum in the river and talked travel.  As you do.  The evening turned into a massive party at the river bar, great night.

Today I went on the river, I was number 65 so you could say there was quite a few of us, on a tractor tube and floated down the river.  Left just after lunch.  It is kind of fun and there are bars, ok places where you can buy Beer Lao, set up about every 20 meters down the river.

It is a strange sight to see whole bunches of travelers floating down the river sipping on Beer Lao.  One of the stops they were pumping out music from the 70’s and it had a tower.  At the top of the tower was a cable with a handle attached.  So of course you kind of have to climb the tower to the platform and jump off swinging across the river, let go and fall the rest of the way into the water.  Of course people are having a great time before you reach this point because there are about 3 pit stops before you get to this one and Beer Lao bottles are not all that small.

It took me a while to talk myself into it but up I went, it was a little hard to change my mind when I started up the ladder because there were a whole bunch of people climbing up the ladder after me.  Thankfully I didn’t end up doing a belly flop, from that high it hurts by the bruises people were sporting and the expressions on their faces when they surfaced.

One of the guys was so embarrassed, he got all the way up the tower, onto the little platform, was holding the swing then he chickened out and went all the way back down the ladder.

As strange as it sounds it was great fun and with all the stops on the way took all day to get back into town.