Goofy Vang Vieng - Laos

Watching friends Vang Vieng style
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Probably one of the most relaxing places in the northern hemisphere. It consists of 1 main street with a few offshoots and nothing other than restaurants, guest houses, agents to book outdoor activities through and pancake carts ......... and we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

What we'll always remember:

• Beer-Lao (it's the only word you need to know to get by in this place)
• Lazing on cushions in the restaurants watching episode after episode of Friends
• Taking the whole day to tube 4km down river

Shawn in mid dive - Beer Lao makes you brave
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Forgettable:

• The road with a thousand turns from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng - the scenery was gorgeous but if like me you suffer from car sickness, then it's torturous

Details

We arrived after lunch (day 50) and quickly fell in line with the slower pace of life here. We spent the afternoon watching Friends episodes over a few fruit shakes at a restaurant where you have no choice but to lie down, sink into the cushions and chill.

A river side bar
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The next morning (day 51), after breakfast, we hired ourselves some tubes and caught a tuk-tuk to a spot 4km's upriver where we hopped in and started floating downstream. There are about 7 makeshift bars along the banks and each one tries to entice you to theirs by shouting 'BEER-LAO' and extending a bamboo stick to help pull you ashore. We made it at least 100 meters before getting pulled over for the first time.

Each bar has either a static line slide or a rope you can swing from and launch yourself into the river, and all it costs you is a Beer-Lao. Anyway 6 hours later and after  floating past a few water buffalo we made it back to town. We met some great people enroute and arranged dinner with an English couple who we spent most of the day with.

Floating down stream at full pace
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Day 52 was spent traveling to Vientiane, where we stopped for about 3 hours and managed to find our way to their most important national monument, Pha That Luang.

We then boarded another 12 hour bus which crossed the Laos- Thailand border and took us all the way to Bangkok

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