Introduction

I'm currently travelling across a few countries in South East Asia - Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. With only time, limited money and zero plans made, let's see where this adventure takes me! In my previous post I mainly talked about the things I’ve learnt and the notes I took about Vang Vieng because it was such a fascinating town and I definitely would want to return, perhaps even multiple times, in the future.

I plan to write about the majority of my activities, experiences and thoughts throughout this trip not just for my future self but for anyone else interested as well.

In this post, I want to talk about my personal experiences throughout these 3 days in Vang Vieng for this trip. The crazy whacky tiring adventures and wonderful friends I made along the way.

Floating down the river in my tube

Getting to Vang Vieng

We started the day (Monday - Day 8) travelling to Vang Vieng from Luang Prabang by mini-van that was organised by our hostel. It costed us about 90,000 LaK which was pretty cheap compared to the rest of the market - always check your hostel prices, they do offer better prices than shops outside.

We had to go through mountains to get to Vang Vieng but the view was just stunning. We even made a rest stop at the top of one of the mountains and all I can say is, the view from my toilet is definitely better than yours.

View from my urinal

Party time!

It was already late afternoon by the time we arrived in Vang Vieng. We had to catch up on work so did not plan anything else for the rest of the day EXCEPT, taking full advantage of the free drinking opportunities offered to us by the generous Sakura Bar and Viva Bar at 8pm.

On the way to Sakura bar, we made friends with Anthony - a brit staying in our hostel. The night started off really slow. We expected the bars to be packed considering the alcohol but packed it was not. We started off with Beer Pong with random people. Being the kiasu that I am - probably got it from my Singaporean half of my mom - I hoarded many cups of free alcohol just before the happy hour ended.

We spent the rest of the night trying to rally people to play more games with us. At this time, Sakura Bar was mainly locals and Koreans (I explained in my previous post why Vang Vieng is full of Koreans) who did not want to play games with us. But we managed to find a good number to play Flippy Cups.

As the night went on, our group definitely grew as well. Adding a pair of Germans - Liones and Lena - a Californian - Diana, a Vietnamese and Brazillian whose names I’ve forgotten =(

We headed to Viva Bar as soon as the 10pm Happy Hour started and it was totally empty to our surprise! Unlike Sakura Bar that only served cheap whiskey and vodka for Happy Hour, Viva Bar served free beer! Perfect for playing stupid drinking games that I love to play! - More Flippy Cups and Karma!

The rest of the night was pretty much a blur at this point. After we’ve completely taken advantage of all the Happy Hours. We went back to Sakura for a night of dancing until 12am before heading back to Viva to dance further.

Here are some flashes of memories I had, it’s not that I forgot most of the night, it’s just that they were mainly just dancing and not that interesting to elaborate on:

Falling of the tiny dance platform in the middle of the bar
Watching the 2 cute bartenders consuming half the products at the bar the whole night
Dancing with a cute local (or Korean? not sure). Only to have Anthony whisper something into her ear and her leaving in anger. Freaking Anthony…I think he was trying to tell me she was a prostitute but I wasn’t sure
Anthony disappearing off with a girl and then not seeing him for the next 3 days - apparently he caught some virus from her and was stuck in bed
Dancing a lot with Diana and being disappointed when she left

Tubing down the river

The next day (Tuesday - Day 9) started off with a horrible hangover of course. But we had to wakeup to do some work as we were taking a half-day off work today to go tubing!

This was what we came to Vang Vieng for and is supposed to be the highlight of Vang Vieng. You can expect to pay about 60,000 LaK for this and another 60,000 LaK for deposit depending on where you do it.

We left the hostel at 11:30am, got our tubes and headed for the river. We were a small group of 9 - Chungsoon and myself, an Australian - Gabby, a Romanian - Sorina, a Brit couple - Dias and Liz and 3 other Canadians - sorry girls, can’t remember your names. We started down the quiet river assuming more people would join in later.

11:30am in Laos is a horrible time to go out as the afternoons here can get really really hot. Fortunately, the water was really really cold making it super relaxing. As we went down the river for about 10 minutes, we reached our first bar where we were thrown a rope and pulled into the bar.

The bar itself had a platform to jump off of. The host was nice enough to give us plenty of free whiskey and tequila shots probably hoping that we would buy more as we get more drunk. This group was not that kind of crazy group and we ended up talking a lot about our travels, experiences and random stuff but the alcohol helped lubricate the social interactions.

We spent a couple hours there before we decided to leave to the next bar but the host told us to wait because another group was coming! We thought it’d finally start getting more fun with more people. It was weird that it was only 9 of us. We waited for another 30 minutes before only TWO people came. Coincidentally, they were people we played Flippy Cups with the night before.

The highlight of that bar was probably climbing to the bridge about 10m high and diving from there. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a fear of heights. But the adrenaline rush I get from going to high places make me want to do things like this in the first place.

On to the 2nd bar!

We all hopped onto our Tube again just relaxingly floating down the river while chatting with our new friends. I got to know Sorina a lot during the tubing experience. I think Vang Vieng is the only place I actually made friends who I actually remember names of and would actually put in the effort to keep i touch with.

It took us an hour before reaching the next bar. This next bar had a flying fox? (Is that what it’s called) into the river which was pretty fun to play with as well.

I think most of us were tired/dehydrated or just disappointed that the tubing experience wasn’t as exciting or crazy as we expected it to be - I’ll explain why at the end. The mood became super mellow and I didn’t want to let it affect me so I just walked around the back of the bar towards some mountains and also played some volleyball with the local kids.

Around 5pm, a van came to pick us up and we headed back to the hostel. At this point, I too became super tired / disappointed and did not do anything for the rest of the night. We did go get some free drinks during Happy Hour to see if I’d change my mind but I guess I just needed some introvert time to myself so I went back to the hostel, wrote my Steemit article that night and just went to sleep early while Chungsoon continued on the bars himself.

Key Takeaways

As mentioned in my previous post. BE CAREFUL of choosing your tubing experience. Always ask what colour tubes you will be getting. The Yellow/White ones are the fun ones while the Red ones are the less fun, less popular Tubing experience. Did I have fun? - yes. Was I disappointed - definitely. Will I want to come back to Vang Vieng just to get the real tubing experience - hell yea.
Avoid where the foreigners go to find the good cheap food. We always try to walk further away from the town center so that we can find the real local restaurants. We manage to find some pretty good duck noodles in the local market.
It’s really hard these days to make sincere friendships. I still keep in touch with Diana, Sorina, Dias and Liz so lets see whether there’s any point to it anymore at this day and age.