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In a Lorry, In a Tube??
We’re still in Laos, now in the very touristy town of Vang Vieng. We’ve made base at the Thavisouk Hotel & Resort – a basic room but it’s got a balcony with views of the river, there’s a swimming pool, WIFI and breakfast is included – all for £20 a night! On Tuesday our travel companion Rob moved on, since then we’ve been enjoying some relaxing time to ourselves. Everything is so cheap here we’ve easily slipped into tourist mode; wasting time at the pool and enjoying the bars and restaurants. We’ve been gorging ourselves on Western food and our average dinner bill, with beer, has only come to £7 for both of us! We’ve also enjoyed some local specialities, particularly laap, minced beef fried with mint, chives and other herbs, served with sticky rice.
The restaurants are a real mix of different styles, from small rooms in a house serving traditional Lao food to huge backpacker places serving all-day English breakfasts while continually screening episodes of Friends. As sad as it may be, we have wasted a few mornings in the latter! We even went to an Irish bar for a Halloween party, although sadly for Bry it was too hot to dress up! There’s obviously not much choice in fancy dress round here as all the live band could do was dress up as Batman and Robin!
Vang Vieng doesn’t have much history but there is still an airstrip that was used by Air America during the Vietnam War, which has now become part of the road network. With its location on the Nam Song River and beautiful karst landscape, it has attracted tourists since Laos opened its borders to foreigners. Unfortunately it turned into a party capital for backpackers centred on the activity of ‘tubing’- floating down the river in an inner-tube, stopping at numerous bars which provided alcohol, drugs and 10 metre high zip-wires. This lethal concoction resulted in 27 deaths in 2011 so the Government stepped in, pulled down the bars not owned by locals and regulated the tubing ‘industry’. Now it is a much more relaxed town, attracting tourists who want to explore the surrounding countryside through trekking, kayaking and cycling.
The tubing still goes on but now there are only a handful of bars on the route, no zip-wires and people are counted in and out. Happy that we weren’t going to float to our certain death, we decided to give it a go and it was a very relaxing way to spend a few hours. We were offered free shots at the bar where it starts, but we politely declined and the barman chuckled when we said ‘maybe 20 years ago’. After about an hour on the water, we decided to stop at a very quiet bar set up in the trees. We got there by the barman running down to the river’s edge and throwing a rope to us, pulling us in and we enjoyed a nice cold beer. We then floated down to the final bar, Smile, where we sipped a couple more beers in the hammocks at the water’s edge listening to chill-out music. Later that night we Skyped Bry’s Mum to say we’d ‘floated down the river in a lorry inner-tube’ but she thought we’d said ‘in a lorry, in a tube’ and she wondered how that was even possible – oh how we laughed!
We are still acclimatising to the tropical weather, which is so different to what we experienced in South East China. It’s amazing that a reduction in a few hundred metres of altitude can make such a difference. At this stage we are unsure if we’ll ever get used to it enough to sleep in Mario, but luckily accommodation is cheap and plentiful. No point soaking our bed sheets in sweat when we can do it to someone else’s!
It’s been great to spend a week here, just doing nothing, just what we needed after China. However, the ‘touristyness’ of the place has been a double-edged sword, great for relaxing and some much craved food, but the tackiness of massage parlours, cheap souvenir shops and constant harassment by tuk-tuk drivers to take their ‘blue lagoon tour’ means we won’t miss the place.
Part of the reason we have been happy to kill time here is that we have been awaiting our Carnet that we need to get Mario into Malaysia. We are very grateful to Caroline’s Mum and Dad for helping us organise this with the RAC in the UK and also to Sharon’s friend Teresa, who kindly agreed to let us have the paperwork sent to her home in Bangkok! In theory we should get a 30 day visa upon entry into Thailand, but we may only get one for 14 days if we can’t convince them we have adequate plans to leave. We therefore wanted to make sure the paperwork had arrived in Bangkok before entering Thailand to give us enough time to pick up the carnet and then spend some time in Pukhet.
Teresa should have the paperwork in the next couple of days so we will enter Thailand tomorrow and see what visa we get and then decide what our plans are. We would like to spend as long as possible there, but we do need to arrange shipping of Mario from Malaysia to Australia, which we may only be able to do once we get to Kuala Lumpur, so our time in Thailand may be limited.
TTFN
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