The Long and Winding Road to Vang Vieng

We spent a lovely couple days relaxing in Luang Prabang.  After our tourist hell experience with the monks at dawn, we...

Spent more time wandering along the Mekong River.

Checked out these rice patties, which will eventually become sun dried rice cakes!

Ordered a pain au chocolat at a French bakery for Chad.

Watching this massive spider wrap up a fresh meal

Gawked at the even bigger spider in the middle of this photo.

Wondered about Laotian seatbelts and their definition of 'road safety' (okay, I'm the only geek who was thinking that).  Note one kid in front, one behind, both tied to Mom.

Enjoyed yet more Beerlao at a riverside cafe.

But all good things must come to an end, and soon it was time to take the bus south to Vang Vieng.  The bus ride was reported by our guidebook and travel forums to be "serpentine" and long, and we awoke early the next morning ready for whatever might come our way.  We had bought tickets on a VIP bus, which sounded pretty fancy.  And our travel agent assured us that this ticket included a toilet on board ("Are you sure?" I asked.  "A toilet on board?"  "Yes, on board," she repeated), refreshments, and lunch was included.

First was a transfer to the bus station.  The tuktuk actually showed up on time to pick us up.  A sign of good things, perhaps.  Then we got to the bus station to see that our 9 am bus was at 9:30.  But c'est la vie, and never mind the fact that we paid 165,000 Kip for our tickets and the price listed at the station was 130,000 and the price on the ticket was 105,000.  "Old ticket," we told ourselves reassuringly.

Our home for the next (allegedly) six hours.

Happily this bus without a door was not for us!

Chad waits patiently for departure time.

Some might say it's a bad sign when your bus has got your destination spelled incorrectly...

What to say of the bus ride?  Well, it was long - more like 7 and a half hours including breaks after finally leaving around 10 am, through twisting and windy roads but beautiful scenery.  Even more twisty than New Zealand.  As you may have guessed from my lengthy discussion of the toilet, above, there was not actually a toilet on the bus.  I was lucky enough to figure this out before we left - not so for the French girl across the aisle who drank a bottle of water and can of pop before figuring it out.  'Refreshments' were one bottle of water handed out at the beginning of the ride, and 'lunch provided' meant a 20 minute stop at a bus company run restaurant at about 3 pm so you could buy your own lunch.

A view from one of our rest stops.  We spent a lot of time crawling up and down and around these smokey hills at about 30 km/h.

But what the hell - it's not like we haven't been through long, nightmarish bus journeys before (I'm looking at you, Turkish overnight buses!), and when we arrived in Vang Vieng this was the view from our hotel room.

And at the cafe next door, beer and dinner was waiting to consume along with sunset views.

They even have warps!

It was extremely smokey at Luang Prabang, during the bus trip, and at Vang Vieng.  It was smokey and smoggy even during our whole flight from Chiang Mai, it was extremely smokey and smoggy the whole way - like riding just above a thick grey soup.  While some of it is pollution, the locals say it's seasonal smoke from farmers burning their rice paddies and (more likely) clearing forested land so it can be planted.  We saw quite a few banana tree fields clinging to the very steep hillsides in the mountainous country we drove through - all planted by hill tribes after the land was cleared by burning.  What a lot off work to harvest those bananas!

Vang Vieng is obviously a beautiful place, but it has a bad reputation for being another tourist circus hell.  The main activities are tubing down the river drunk, eating 'happy' pancakes, and then watching Friends or South Park reruns (playing loudly at every restaurant) whilst staring at the screen totally zoned out.  There's hundreds of tourists, hundreds of guesthouses, loads of tourist-'friendly' restaurants, and the stunning scenery.  Worth a stop for the night, but I wouldn't want to spend 10 days there as the girl behind us on the bus the next day had done!

Running through the middle of town is an abandoned airport runway, where locals light huge bonfires at night and cross it in trucks and scooters to get between the town's main roads.

There's a tiny night market, but you won't see many tourists here - they're too busy hanging out with Ross and Rachel.

Alcohol is ridiculously cheap here.  You can get a 26 ounce bottle of 'whisky' (probably some other kind of locally-made spirit) for three Canadian dollars!  It's a dream for some and the results a nightmare for others.

Cobra and scorpion, together at last in alcohol.  Um, no thank you.

Look at all the Johnny Walker!  Oh wait, that's not Johnny Walker...

Vang Vieng is apparently trying to clean up its act and cut down a bit on the noisy, reckless tourist hedonism.  So in support of those efforts, I'll leave you with a couple shots to remind us of why people started going there in the first place - the tubing river.