We're too old for this....maybe not!

Arriving in Vang Vieng
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Vang Vieng could accurately be described as part festival, part brothel, part theme park. Touted as the place to lose your mind by the young lings we have encountered and described as the "Fuengrirola of the east" by oldies like us we were more than a little skeptical of what Vang Vieng would be like.

We arrived on an ancient bus with Gaedano in tow. At dusk, the monsoon sky was ten shades of purple, blue and porno pink with the sun dropping behind the imposing karst mountains of Vang Vieng. We stumbled across the runway in the dark, (Laos seems to have a runway for every person in the country and only 10 planes, a legacy of the CIA apparently) and made our way into town.

Arriving in Vang Vieng
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Town effectively consists of one road, lined with the most average of guesthouses and traveler cafes. There is one major difference with the "same same" cafes in Vang Vieng though. Every single one without fail has a huge television mounted to the wall and is playing an episode of the sitcom dirge "Friends" to an invisible audience. Surely a lure to ensnare drug enfeebled minds, in low season this marketing ploy doesn't seem to be working very well as every cafe - and there are literally dozens, is utterly empty. Thus our entry into Vang Vieng is a surreal one - we behold a totally empty street, filled only with the light of deserted cafes and the noise of five phoney new yorkers and hundreds of barely amused studio audiences, echoing back from the mountains in the tropical night. Will Rachel and Ross finally get together? Will Chandler finally get his comeuppance at the hands of five swarthy seamen down at the docks? What is the cultural and social cost of subjecting your families to bad television and western kids on tranquilizers and opiates 24 hours a day? All the answers to these questions coming up in Laos, sometime in the next ten years.

Typical Laos view
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We skip the car crash tourism disaster of the high street and beat it down to the river, to a highly recommended guesthouse called Champa Lao. It was described as "the best f###in guesthouse in the whole world" by a small group of excited Irish guys we bumped into, and bless their hearts, they were right. After seeing a couple of filthy dorms we walked into the courtyard garden of Champa Lao. White trumpet flowers planted everywhere filled the air with the most beautiful perfume and we fell to floor on a galleried veranda with 180degree views of the river and the mountains behind. We opted for what was basically the penthouse, overhanging the river with a large room and a large bathroom, canopied bed and the best TV in the world, a window 3 metres wide overlooking the mountains, river, island, and hilarious spectacle that is Vang Vieng.

Champa Lao
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OK, Tubing. This is what you come here for, which in a nutshell involves loading up on your choice of poison, then taking a tractor inner tube down to the river, throwing it in ,jumping on and floating downstream. Roughly every 400 metres there is a bar offering everything in the way of refreshment and you are lassoed from the bank and pulled in to erm.. refresh yourself. Lao Lao the local whisky is normally distributed free by the bottle to grease the wheels so to speak, and to induce more people to throw themselves from the seriously dangerous rope swings in place. So we swung, drunk, swung and drunk, had a huge mudwrestle involving about 300 nubile young people and a few oldies like us sneaking in and generally had about the best of times. Its just something you'd have to do before you can say its not for you - everybody we met asked us to go again tomorrow and were amused when we told them we might be staying in with a good book. Great great fun - but a once a year kind of thing.

Favourite photo of SE Asia
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Again, we were here in the depths of wet season hence the party was limping rather than swinging but this suited us and we drifted around swimming and lazing, and catching up on a bit of football, which is thorougly enjoyable without England being involved. A great evening with Gaedano and two italian friends and a guitar came and went and suddenly we'd been here far too long. Time to start making the long trip up into China, leaving the predictable lushness and lazy life of SE Asia behind, and getting back to some serious travelling.

Best TV in town
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Not many photos for this entry - they didn't make it past the censors!