Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng (Laos)

The town of Luang Prabang has a strange custom. It is home to hundreds of monks and every morning, they take to the streets and line up to collect food donations from the local residents. Each monk carries his own food tin and walks down the main road, where the locals put some offering into it. We’re not quite sure where the tradition started but it sure seemed odd. We got up at 5.30am one morning to witness the strange event. We were happy that there were very few tourists up doing it – it is mostly locals. It is not common in this part of the world to participate in any activity that has more locals than tourists doing it.

Continuing further South in Laos, we made our way to Vang Vieng. Our reason for stopping in here was to try “Tubing”. All over South East Asia, we’d seen plenty of backpackers wearing “Vang Vieng Tubing” t-shirts so it is well and truly hyped and we were really looking forward to it. By this stage, we had teamed up with a group of 8 other travellers that we had met on the slow boat: a Canadian couple, two Swedish brothers, two Irish girls, an American guy and a German guy. We got on really well with this group and they are the ones who made our trip to Vang Vieng so memorable. We'll miss you guys!

So what is tubing?

It’s fairly simple really. Basically, you just float down a 5km stretch of river lounging on an old inflatable tube from inside a tractor tyre. The whole thing is made more interesting by having a bunch of bars littered along the riverbanks which have a range of activities/games such as mud tug-of-war, mud volleyball and giant slides, zip wires and trapeze swings all designed to drop you into the water from great height. Despite the high numbers of extremely drunk 18 year olds who were probably let out of home for the first time, we all had a great time and it did actually live up to the event it promised to be.

Vang Vieng itself is surrounded by fantastic scenery and should be a beautiful place (we spent a day on bikes exploring some local caves, and another day kayaking down the river) but the town is spoiled by the numerous tacky bars/restaurants/tour companies/ etc that have removed any trace of charm it might once have had and we’ll be happy to leave it tomorrow as we head further South.

Oh yeah....one funny thing we’ve seen quite a bit of here is people on motorbikes or bicycles using umbrellas!