Lessons for the Guadalupe
We didn’t arrive in Vang Vieng with very good attitudes. Actually, we arrived with horrible attitudes, expecting a cesspool of backpackers who never left their freshman year of college, all set to “get wasted!!!” and stumbling around town in swimsuits and aviator glasses between pizza gorge-fests. You know the type.
As it happened, we found exactly that (many restaurants had “Let’s get wasted!” menus – really), but it was more entertaining than obnoxious, easy to escape and, well, there were too many fun distractions around for it to matter all that much!
Vang Vieng is set in a gorgeous area of Laos, surrounded by huge limestone karst formations that create a landscape nearly identical to that of El Potrero Chico in Mexico, one of our favorite places. It is a major destination for the activities on offer, including kayaking, cycling, cave exploring, rock climbing and most notably, tubing.
Any of you Texas folk know exactly what tubing is, and you’ve probably enjoyed many summer days floating down the Guadalupe in a big inner tube with your fully-stocked cooler of Lone Star beer floating next to you. I’ve enjoyed that myself, but after “floating the river” in Laos, Texas will never, ever be the same. Let me explain why…
First of all, tubing in Laos is cheap. $6 gets you the tube and tuktuk transport several kilometers upriver to an organic farm, where you put in on the Nam Som river and eventually float back to town. You have to return by 6 p.m. or there is an overtime charge – this is their real moneymaker and I’ll explain why in a bit.
The scenery is of course amazing and the river is incredibly clean- no beer bottles like you find on the Guadalupe! Why? Because no one brings coolers! Instead you pick one of the many bamboo bars lining the river and, when you’ve made your choice, there is always someone with a long bamboo pole to help pull you in to shore. You toss your tube onto the pile, climb up to the crowded deck, order a big Beer Lao (3 mug equivalent) for about a dollar, receive a free whiskey shot with that, then relax in the sun, enjoying the music and watching people make fools of themselves.
When you’re ready for some activity (ie there’s enough alcohol in your system to justify plunging yourself into ice cold water), it’s time for the best part…trapeze!!
Yes, the bars along the Nam Som have erected a number of rope swings, trapezes, water slides and the like, all of which are free of charge and, as always in developing Asian countries, highly safe. Simply climb up the planks nailed onto a tree, grab the bar and go! The daredevils drop at the great height of the first swing, while others pendalum a few times to make the jump a bit less intimidating. Some people (including “elf girl,” a blonde bikini-clad character who wore a colorful pointy hat and pranced around pouring whisky shots for people…she must’ve stumbled into an opium field on the way over) were truly adventurous and swung over the water by their knees, while drinking a beer…let’s just say it didn’t get boring!
Once you do get restless, however, you get back in your tube and float along until another reggae-playing bar catches your eye, at which point you pull over and do more of the same, maybe ordering a plate of pad thai or barbecued meat to go with your drink. There are no police, no “cooler restrictions,” no ID-checks – and it works! People are there to have fun, there’s no pretense of liability – if you mess up, it’s your problem, so drink/swing/swim/float at your own risk! It’s beyond fun.
We aren’t exactly binge-drinkers and were able to have a great time, enjoy a few beers and still be coherent enough to notice the sun starting to sink and guessing that we’d better float on back before all of the warmth of the day was lost behind the mountains! The second half of the float was downright serene – the bars spaced out (everyone was still at the first one anyways), rice fields appeared, and we had it pretty much all to ourselves. We passed a large deck marked “Last Bar!” and knew that it would soon fill up; we moved on.
By 4:30 we were pulling ourselves out of the water, just before the temperature really started to drop. There was conveniently another collection of bamboo platforms right on the water’s edge – we ordered some sodas and watched the sunset. At 5:40 we hauled our tubes up the hill and back to the warehouse. We were the first ones back! At 6:15 we watched the tuktuks start dropping off loads of people with their tubes; most everyone stumbles their way into “Last Bar,” drinks just one more and eventually realizes that it’s dark and they still have 30 minutes of floating left! Conveniently, tuktuks wait right outside for these unfortunate souls (return trip is NOT included in the rental price) and make sure that they wait on a full load (they somehow seem to fill up right around 6 p.m.) before returning to town, where everyone is slapped with an overtime charge. Brilliant!
Anyways, the Guadalupe has a few lessons to learn (and laws to get rid of)! Vang Vieng has made an art of it, and they’ve got something else that is simply brilliant – Friends bars. Yes, I do in fact mean the television show Friends, which plays on rotation at all hours of the day in several restaurants, all of which are outfitted with cushioned bamboo platforms, perfect for lounging on for hours. We had scoffed at such an idea, but come on…it’s great! It’s important to get over all of that “cultural experience” stuff when you’re in this town.
We got over it, and we enjoyed hours of Friends (there were also venues offering Family Guy and Simpsons), ate from pancake vendors and did the whole “thing.” We drew the line at hot dog sandwiches, tours, beer at breakfast and walking around town in bathing suits, which an appallingly high number of people do. Laos is a country where even shorts/tank tops are considered inappropriate – it felt strange enough to be wearing a swimsuit on the river and I couldn’t believe the classless way that soooo many people presented themselves! Actually, I could believe it. It’s exactly what we’d expected. But still!
We’d expected to last a single day in such a place, but in actuality we stayed three. We had a great day of bike riding and cave exploring, a lot of fun with a motorbike yesterday and I was able to get in some long, solitary (no one gets up at 6 a.m. in Vang Vieng), scenic runs. Yes, the majority of the people were those I thought I left behind when I left college life in Tampa and it was next to impossible to escape the dumbed-down (priced-up) western menus, but overall it was, as one description read, “not Laos, but still good fun!”
Tags: Laos, tubing, Vang Vieng
allisonrae
December 8th, 2008 at 10:48 am
[…] Original post by allisonrae […]
December 9th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
So I’ve never done the Guadalupe…but now if I ever “get” the chance to I won’t be able to get the images you’ve created out of my mind! Sounds like you had a great time!