Vang Vieng Rock City

So, Vang Vieng. This place needs a bit of an introduction. Ten years ago, it was on no one’s radar. Something changed. It got listed in Lonely Planet, for one reason and one reason only: tubing.

Tubing in Vang Vieng is imitated in other places, but its legendary here. Basically, the setup is such, there’s a river, and you float down it in an inner tube, bouncing from bar to bar, getting as inebriated as possible in waters that can and sometimes do kill. If this sounds brilliant, its because obviously, it is.

At first, there was apparently just a couple of bars, and most people would actually spend their time floating down the entirety of the river. Nowadays, there’s a huge smattering of bars, and no one really ever makes it even to the last one, let alone the entirety of this part of the river (the tubing starts about 5km north of central Vang Vieng town, there’s about 1km of bars or so, 4km of open river).

I didn’t really know what to expect my first evening, and I wouldn’t find out for a bit longer. That night, I went around and got some food, nothing too special, and wandered over towards all of the big noise that I heard, eventually stumbling past Hannah, who you might remember from my time in Chiang Mai in Thailand. She invited me over to meet her and her friends at a bar later on that night, called the Sakura bar.

A couple hours later, as well as a unique Vang Vieng pancake of crepe-y kind of pancake plus butter, chocolate syrup and bananas, and I met up with them. There were a bunch of other girls with her, and two British guys were hanging out too, whose names I now have no recollection of. They were amiable chaps, who joked a bit about the unfortunate nature of having another guy show up to their party of lots of girls and just the two of them, but we got along quite well after.

Those two guys had actually wound up in Vang Vieng after an extended period of travel, and made the decision to work at this bar for a while before moving on to another destination; they in fact had promoted the place to Hannah and her friends earlier in the day, promising a free drink or two, which is why they made the decision to go to that bar after all.

Just a bit after that, a game of pool of sorts started up where anyone who wanted to join put in 10,000 kip, and whoever won would get it all. There was about 16 guys who joined, and the rule was, we all took turns, and everytime it was your turn, if you knocked a pool ball in, you kept whatever points you had (you start with three), but if you don’t hit one in, you lose a point. The last one standing was the winner.

I didn’t win, of course, but I made it to the fifth round, and there were only six, so that was nice. After that, I returned to where all the girls were, and talked to them for a good spell of a time. By the time 11pm or so rolled around, we all agreed to get moving on to another location; the guys from before lamented, as they had to stay behind to work at the bar we were currently at, but such is life, eh?

So we walked and down around a couple of streets, there aren’t many to choose from, until we came to a sign that notified us that the Bucket Bar was not far, just one left turn and a traipse across a bridge and you’d find yourself to a place with drinks so deep you could drown yourself in them.

That was in fact the destination the girls were interested in, so that’s where we went, and whiled our time away dancing and drinking here and there. I stepped away every now and again to try and check out what was going on all around the area, and I didn’t really have a strong connection to anyone I was with anyway.

There were a few other bars in the area, to be sure; all the action, though, was at the Bucket Bar. I found out later that the Bucket Bar has a closing time, and once that time comes upon, the clientele shifts over to a place with some generic name along the lines of Rock Bar or something like that, and then continues the same ordeal until well past 4am.

At this time, though, I wasn’t in the mood to stay out quite so late to find out the truth; Hannah found herself encircled by yet even more men, and I found I didn’t know much of anyone else around, so I finally made the decision to head out at maybe half past midnight or even 1am. I didn’t go straight home, but instead wandered the streets to see what sorts of creepy crawlies come out in the depths of night in this town.  The answer: not much of anything. It is a quiet place, excepting the asburd profundities in the concentrated areas where foreigners abode.

I retired to my hut, and prepared myself mentally for the next day, which, somewhere during the duration of this first afternoon/evening in Vang Vieng, I had registered myself for a caving and kayaking trip that was sure to be a nice diversion.

The trip was to start in the morning, but not too terribly early, maybe around 9am. I first got myself a sandwich from one of the dozens of carts offering such things in the area. A bizarre combination of the French baking legacy left behind in Laos combined with the packs of cheap young Westerners has produced something of a random sandwich cottage industry in this town, and dozens of Lao men and women of all ages set to work crafting a seemingly endless number of sandwiches that all feature the same baguettes, happy cow cheese, and chicken, along with any of a large variety of other ingredients. Everyone has the same menu (which I foolishly never took a picture of) and Westerners who stay long enough soon develop a taste for their favorite crafter of said sandwiches. I stayed long enough, but I only ever had one of these things.

Anyway, I bought a couple of other goodies as well, and waited at the curb. I soon met the guy who’d be my guide for the day, who you’ll see pictures of later on. His English was more than serviceable, though not perfect; enough to tell me his name was Toy (in Lao) and that I can call him Toy Boy, but not enough to realize how bad the name Toy Boy sounds. His heart was in the right place though, so you could scarcely criticize the guy.

He noted I was there early, something that was unusual in these parts, and counted on us having to wait longer for the other Westerners who were coming along to finally show up.

He was right about that, but not egregiously so. The Westerners aside from myself, it seemed, had mostly been picked up at the various places of lodging they had arranged, whereas I had made my own way over. It was a mixed group; two German girls, a Dutch guy, an older French couple; perhaps others that I don’t quite recall at the moment. I’d like to say there was also a much older British guy around, but don’t hold me to it.

We took a tuk tuk laden with kayaks over to our first site of true departure; at this point I still maintained a comfortable distance from befriending any of my co-tour partakers, but it wasn’t long until I started talking to the two German girls, who were supposedly old high school friends, but who in fact seemed like they were of ambiguous sexuality, not that it mattered. They were both quite friendly, and the only other people in my tour group who were anywhere close to being the same age as myself, so it was only natural that we’d try our best to get along.

As soon as we reached our first location, we piled out. The kayaks were removed, but we didn’t use them immediately. In fact, they were being deposited for other people for the time being; we were first headed to a couple of caves, the first of which being named Elephant Cave.

The walk to it was itself actually pretty nice. Here are some pictures:

When we reached the area of the cave, I have to say, I was initially pretty disappointed, as it was a very shallow cave. It had a large carving of Buddha within, and not much else, save for a small rock outcropping which looked vaguely like an elephant, being the source of the cave’s name.

Toy tried his best to be a good storyteller about the place, and then demonstrated some simple Buddhist fortune telling rituals involving shaking a random stick with a fortune on it out of a can of many such sticks, bless his heart, but his delivery was a little lacking. All throughout the day, though, we did our best to indulge him and his best efforts, so hopefully he never felt too bad about it. He had an exceedinly exuberant attitude about all things, though, so I’m not too worried about it.

Then, we left this cave,and started wandering towards others. We took a short walk to a patio area; in fact, they had a couple of gazebos set up, and we were told that that’s where we’d be having lunch shortly thereafter. First, though, caves. So we went in to another cave, one for which I’ve forgotten the name; a dog joined with us on the way to the cave, and went all the way into the damn thing with us, which was fairly impressive given the setup of the mouth of the cave itself.

This cave was much more cave-y, and reached back really quite far.  We never went all the way, actually; we wandered in what I’d guess was maybe a sixth of a mile or so, perhaps a bit more or less. Toy pointed out a variety of nice stone formations and such, then took us to a very broad expanse of the cave, asking us to turn off all of our torches after arranging ourselves in a circle, and having a moment of silence; half a minute into it, he let out a big bellow of a sound and jumped heavily on the ground, trying his best to scare us; mostly we just laughed, then turned our torches back on, and wandered our way carefully out of the cave yet again, the dog following all the while.

It was apparently just a leg of a much larger cave complex that lies underneath the hills of that area, and you could apparently reach the “water cave” from it if you went far enough, but that it had not as of yet been properly charted and only cursorily explored, by Toy himself and another of the people who worked at the same tour company, Green Lao Adventures or something like that.

This had the mark of true adventure on it, but we were not fated to be the necessary expedition crew to capitalize, and instead had to return to our daytripping existence out at the gazebos to eat some handily crafted banana leaf wrapped packets of fried rice, along with some freshly cooked barbeque skewers, a banana, and sure enough, some bread. It was actually a pretty solid little feast, depicted for you here:

It was after this point that the real fun was due to begin, as we were going to go to the water cave and do some tubing (sans alcohol) there.  When we arrived, we switched into what could be counted as swimming gear (which for me, just mean switching from a t-shirt to a locally purchased Vang Vieng tank top) and put our valuables in a dry bag that Toy volunteered to carry for us. Then, we got decked out in head lamps. For some unknown reason, everyone but myself was granted nice modern head lamps; I, on the other hand, was granted the sole honor of carrying what seemed like some contraption crafted from expeditions a hundred years prior; a dimly functioning head lamp was strapped to my forehead, then connected by way of exposed wiring to something that seemed like a small car battery, and had a flimsy case enclosing it, granting absolutely no protection from what seemed like the logical end result of electrical current bleeding out into the waters it would soon be submersed in. There was dozens of them lined up on the trees around this area, though:

So I trusted in what little I believe in in this universe, and hopped in a tube and got into the water, which was exceedingly cool compared to the heat of Southeast Asia. I didn’t feel any electrical shock whatsoever, which was rather nice, and I started wading off towards a line that had been set up running through the matrix of this cave.

We all pulled ourselves along this line, skimming effortlessly over the water, though spinning out of control all the while. I seemed to move sideways more often than not, and having no clue as to what the depth of the water was, I was loathe to think that perhaps I’d fall out, so I held on to that line with a feverish grip.

Soon, we reached a plateau of pebbles, and found we had to walk and carry our tubes for a short time, until we got to another pool, where we left our tubes at and walked across. It was a fairly shallow pool, though it was very much concave, with a eerily steep decline if you weren’t careful. All the while, my feet hurt like hell from the pebbles beneath. I don’t know how everyone else did it, it was truly painful to walk through that stuff for me.

Toy took us to a broader portion of the cave, and told us that the water filtered into this part of the cave from other mostly unknown areas, and that if you waded out just 15 feet, the water would rapidly grow deeper until it was overhead. A few people gave it a try, but I was still quite cautious about this whole swimming in caves business, and let them have their fun without me.

Five minutes later, we headed back to where we had left our tubes, and started our way out of the cave. Most of us chose to go at a much slower pace on the way out than we had on the way in, knowing how short of a distance it was (it wasn’t really that short, but the tubes moved pretty fast). We hooted and howled, reverberating our silly statements that we exist in this sandwiched hollows of the world, exploring it in a fashion that seems so essentially human.

At the exit of the cave, we found out eyes had swiftly been attuned to low-light areas, and we could see through the water at the mouth of the cave to the bottom with the greatest of ease, and we were treated with the surprise of thousands of tiny fish swimming all around in the waters we graced the surface of. I don’t know about everyone else, but this actually sped up my exit from the cave a bit. I just wasn’t in a mood for wallowing in fishies.

Outside of the cave, we doffed our lamp gear, and I said goodbye to my pioneer’s equipment, and got ready for the main event, kayaking.

First we had yet another walk on our hands, this one a bit longer than the previous ones. Technically when I had signed up for this trip, there had been mention of some trekking, which usually indicates a foot-passing of some sort of particularly nice scenery, or through some villages and the like; I guess we were walking through a nice area, and there were indeed villagers around farming tobacco, but it was all within sight of a road not far off, so it seemed like the label “trekking” was a bit forced, but, fair enough. Here’s some pictures from that portion of the trip:

During this portion, the German girls, myself, and Toy all got to know each other even more, and we had a nice time socializing.

All told, it was maybe a twenty minute walk to the embarcation point, where the kayaks awaited us; I was eager to get on with this part of the trip, it had been perhaps two years since I had last been in a kayak (incidentally, at that time, in Mission Bay in San Diego, I capsized myself, in waters far deeper than I’d be dealing with here), and I couldn’t wait.

Apparently, some of the others on our little group trip thought that we’d be kayaking a distance of about 10 km, rather than what ended up being about 5 or 6 km, and they were visibly and audibly upset about this turn of events, but pretty much stuck to the fate that had been given them.

Our kayaks were all two seaters, so we paired up in what were all entirely predictable pairs (which meant, everyone sat with the one other person they had actually joined this tour with; me being the only one who had come solo, I got stuck with Toy as my partner), hopped in, and set off.

It was an incredibly pleasant kayak ride, and Toy gave me ample opportunities to set aside my paddle and pull out my camera to take some pictures of the ride. Given that, here’s some photos!

Along the way, we ran into many other kayakers; without exception, they were ALL Chinese, so I actually found myself chatting with a fair number of other kayakers. Toy tried to alternately get me to flirt with a couple of Chinese girls, as well as to help him flirt with one or two; it didn’t get far, but it was pretty funny.

Eventually, we came upon the scene of the tubing. The REAL tubing. And I can only imagine how wide eyed and stupefied I must’ve appeared to the average tuber! It looked entirely like something out of a ridiculous movie about spring break in Cancun or something, and I almost felt like I was riding through an amusement park as we paddled through; young Westerners wearing as little as possible, careening into the water in every way conceivable, rocking out to all the standard modern tunes . . . I laughed to think of what the other Chinese kayakers thought of the scene, and whether they had any knowledge previously of what it would be like. This was pretty far outside the bounds of the ways people have fun where they came from, and probably none of them would have ever imagined such a thing existed. Ahhh the joys of culture shock, and the myriad ways in which it can happen.

Just as soon as we had come across this scene, though, it was over. I actually recognized another pair of German girls, the ones I had met on that most epic of boat rides only a couple days prior, floating down the tubes, and saw Hannah lounging off of some wooden pier or another, and we all waved mightily. After this, it was several kilometers of mostly uninterrupted, unmitigated beauty. There’s not a lot of ways to describe it, so instead I’ll just show it:

Finally an hour later, we had reached the end of the line, and pulled our kayaks ashore. It turned out that the final point was in fact right next to my guesthouse, so I promptly said my goodbyes, and went to go take a shower and rest up for a while.

Here's a picture of my guesthouse hut, by the way, which cost me 5 USD a night. Its the one on the left.

I didn’t have a clear plan for the night, but I figured at the very least that I’d be doing some catching up online, getting an amazingly tasty hamburger from a restaurant I had spotted several times already by this point “The Aussie Bar”) and then eventually heading to some bar or another.

That burger really was good, too. Like, really fricking good. Two patties, two of everything, and soooo juicy. Gotta love it. It was also pretty much the only food joint in Laos that offered a brand of beer other than Beer Lao (not that I dislike Beer Lao, far from it, but its nice to have a bit of variety, you know?)

The rest of this night turned out to be pretty chill. I randomly bounced into Evan, the uber-Canuck I had also met in Chiang Mai at the same hostel as Hannah, and I had another beer with him as he ate at the same restaurant (I ran into him on my way out of the place). We hung out for the rest of the night, wandering around aimlessly a bit until we decided to go back to the Bucket Bar.

We hung out there for a while, had some drinks and acted slightly foolish, but left pretty quickly all in all, whiling away the hours on the streets eating chicken sandwiches and drinking some more Beer Lao, talking about anything.

He had had a couple of pretty interesting experiences in Thailand that I only found out about at this point, even though they had ocurred prior to the point in which I met him for the first time, which I’m going to share with you guys just for the drama of it all.

In one instance, on the tourist island of Phuket, he found himself on the wrong side of the law for no good reason at all. He and a friend of his were just out in the streets at night after a long night of . . . all the normal stuff people do on vacation at night in tropical paradises, and found themselves in an alley, when some police show up. If I remember correctly, a guy had approached them asking if they wanted to buy some weed or something, but knowing the stiff punishments drugs get in Southeast Asia, they declined. However, the sudden arrival of police still set their minds racing, for the same reason they had declined the stuff to begin with, and the friend of Evan’s just started running. What else could Evan do but run, too? So they ran, and the police ran after them. Evan’s friend’s endurance had apparently been sapped by the festivities of the day, though, so ultimately the police were able to catch up with them, as Evan wouldn’t abandon his friend, or so he said.

At this point, the cops tried to find out why it was exactly they had been running. The guys both stressed that they hadn’t actually done anything, they weren’t in posession of anything, they were just scared. Apparently, the cops ultimately believed them, and then basically said, “So what? We’ve got some drugs right here, that we can put on you and no one would know the difference, nor would they suspect anything untoward” (I’m assuming they weren’t quite that articulate in English, but you know, sentiment remains). The cops asked for the equivalent of about 1000 USD each to not go to jail, which, in any event, the guys certainly weren’t carrying. Ultimately, they talked the cops down substantially, but still had to pay a few hundred each to not go to jail.

As is the case anywhere, but especially anywhere outside of the Western world, you do NOT want to go to jail in Thailand. Thailand in particular has an especially nasty reputation for its prisons, and Evan was probably never so scared in his life as he was at that particular point in time.

That was the end of that story, though, so all’s well that ends without going to prison or dying, I guess?

I think I’ve actually already previously mentioned his other story, about what happened when he went to check out the notorious “Ping Pong Show” in Bangkok; as soon as I can actually get online, I’ll double check, and if I’m wrong, I’ll add that in here.

Anyway, it was a good night of just chumming it up, and after a couple of hours, we were both tired enough that it was time to go to bed. We made plans to meet for breakfast the next day, and head out tubing together, and said goodbye. The next day, I’d be doing things I’d never previously imagined myself to be doing in my entire life, repeatedly.