The trip to Vang Vieng was a little crazy. Suffice it to say that the roads were windy, the driver took the turns very quickly, and Matteo got a little bit sick. Aside from that, it was fascinating to drive through hill tribe towns and see things like cows blocking our way in the road, babies sitting in the road (seriously, in one town there was a one-year old sitting in the middle of the road and when our driver honked, a 3-year old ran to grab the baby out of the way!), and dead animals strung up by the side of the road. We also saw some of the most dramatic mountain landscapes we’ve ever witnessed.
Vang Vieng is kind of a strange place. It’s a small town along a river, with incredible mountains surrounding it. The landscape is truly beautiful. The main activity in Vang Vieng is tubing down the Nam Song river, a 3-kilometer trip that takes about 3 hours in the dry season and one hour in the rainy season. What could be better than tubing down a river with gorgeous scenery, right?
Well, at some point in the last 10 years someone decided that what it could use is bars along the river, “happy shakes” with drugs in them, and bar/restaurants in town where backpackers can sit for hours watching reruns of American television shows such as Friends, Family Guy, and the Simpsons. So that’s exactly what you find in Vang Vieng, along with hundreds of drunken backpackers.
All that being said, we actually enjoyed our time there. Tubing was fun and beautiful, and we even stopped at some of the bars for a few drinks (they “fish” for you by throwing life preserves or plastic bottles on a line, and if you want to go to the bar you just grab onto the line and they pull you in). We went to a bar with a giant waterslide that our friend John went down, and one that had a slingshot and darts. We also admittedly spent a few blissful hours perched at a restaurant watching Friends. It’s Debbie's favorite TV show, after all.
So putting aside the fact that this backpacker haven is in the middle of Laos, it was actually kind of fun. We just can’t understand why that’s what Vang Vieng turned into. The truth is that if it were in the U.S. or some other Western country, no one would bat an eye. But why in Laos of all places??
because sometimes after all the adventures and the wild buses and the golden monks and the elephants and the pancakes on sticks and the words you've never heard of... sometimes you just to for a minute to pretend that you're home, watching "Friends" on on your couch.
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