We finally arrived at the little village of Vang Vieng that's home to the infamous tubing experience which we'd heard so much about through our entire trip, and seen so many people wearing the classic 'In the tubing' vests. It basically felt like a rite of passage for us.

Tubing is pretty much just a big river pub crawl except you're surrounded by some stunning natural scenery - all you do is float down a river in a big rubber ring and stop off at bars along the way that have fun things like rope swings, big slides and zip lines into the water and mud pools with people having mud fights, and you get served your cocktails in sand buckets. You start at like 2 in the afternoon, and the day we did it I ended up being basically already quite drunk when we started so had soo many cuts and bruises from banging myself on rocks by the end of the day. We also had the word VIRGIN written across our chests, because we were tubing virgins, by these bar promoters we'd met the night before who were so good to know because they handed out the free drinks at the bars in the village and took us to the best places.
When you're floating down the river you get picked up by the people that work at the bars throwing you a rope to hold onto so you can drag yourself along and climb up to reach the bar, and when you get there you're handed a free shot by a 10yr old holding a big bottle of laolao whisky. The last bar we got to had a big mud pool with a slide into it and lots of people having a mudfight which we joined. Except when I decided to get myself all cleaned up, Shapiro brought it upon himself to gang up with an english guy and pick me up and swing me back into the mud pool by my arms and legs, and then threw mud in my mouth. Dick.


You get back into the village around 6pm and everyone is pretty wasted by this point so you see a lot of girls just walking around in bikinis, guys running around naked doing stupid drunken things, people making out on the street - and all in a Lao village where people are more conservative and traditional, and the women dress very modestly, and there are children around, so its kind of sad seeing the town being taken over by obnoxious tourists out to get wasted and laid. Vang Vieng is also a "happy" place where you can wink at the waitors in restaurants to get the "special" menu with mushroom shakes, marijuana pizzas, opium pancakes etc. except despite this, the whole town is run by the police who will walk around in plain clothes, offer you drugs, and then charge you a $500 fine when you buy any, and a lot of the guesthouses are also owned by the police. Another weird thing about Vang Vieng is the 'Friends' phenomenon - so many bars will have tv screens playing old episodes from Friends to a reclined audience tired out from a days frolicking on the river.