Vang Vieng: the Mecca of backpackers. Once a beautiful, idyllic town where you could take part in various intrepid outdoor activities: tubing down the river, climbing up the limestone karsts, kayaking all the way down to the capital Vientiane – now the Benidorm of Laos where young twenty-somethings drink beer, Mekong whiskey buckets and magic mushroom shakes all day whilst watching endless reruns of Friends and Family Guy in the chilled out cafes. The New Zealand Herald describes it as “If teenagers ruled the world, it might resemble Vang Vieng.” I know what you’re thinking. How would I, a late-thirty-something teetotaller, possibly fit in with this Lord of the Flies playground? Obviously it was going to be a huge struggle.
Vang Vieng
Practically everyone who I knew in Spicy Laos headed down to Vang Vieng that day – the hostel had emptied out. I’d been of two minds as to whether to head straight there or go to Phonsavan and visit the Plain of Jars but I decided to follow the masses. I could visit the Plain of Jars just as easily from Vang Vieng. Jan and Yana decided to hitch-hike down there but I went for the more relaxed option of getting the early afternoon bus. Just as I was boarding the bus, Jan Zwei surprised me by suddenly saying that he was coming too. It was going to be a big party.
It was hard to sleep on the bus – Laos was never invaded by the Romans so the concept of a straight road has never really entered into the national psyche. It seems that the innovations of John McAdam are not strictly enforced either. The windy, twisting, potholed roads of Laos are liable to create nausea in the most settled stomach. At one point we made a stop for refreshments and the happy place; my foot had gone to sleep in the cramped condition and as I staggered out of the bus I managed to stub my toe on the ground causing it to bleed copiously. I’m used to walking around with gaping gashes in my big toes but it the first time since Latin America that I’d actually injured my foot and this was before I’d started drinking.
Jan Zwei and I arrived in Vang Vieng at about 7pm and then spent at least an hour wandering around with our backpacks looking for somewhere to stay. Everywhere we went the answer was the same: no room at the inn; try again tomorrow. Never mind about tomorrow, we thought. We need somewhere for tonight! As we wandered around facing rejection after rejection, we ran into Jan and Yana in an Indian restaurant: it was quite clearly a small town. Eventually we ended up at the Cocoon resort – this was a lot more money than we’d normally spend but we were starting to get desperate. Besides, they even had a swimming pool – although in daylight it was shown not to be worthy of mention. As we’d been wandering around we’d seen tuk-tuks full of drunk youths coming back from “tubing” – they were very loud, barely standing and covered in marker pen tattoos. I’m sure when we went we’d do it with a greater degree of decorum.
After we’d dropped off our stuff I went back to the Indian with Jan and Yana – the food was pretty good (in fact I went nearly every day that I was in Vang Vieng) but they didn’t really believe in much spice: even the mutton Vindaloo was milder than a medium curry back home. As was our wont, we played a big round of Yaniv. It was fast becoming our favourite pastime. Some American guys we knew from the hostel in Luang Prabang who all taught English in China – Frank, Vinny and Craig – wandered past and told us about the Oh La La bar around the corner that did buckets for 10,000 kip for the next half-an-hour. We decided to join them there and ran into Cheryl and Fiona from Spicy Laos too. We ended up on a big table playing card drinking games – mostly Asshole and F**k the Dealer. Jan in particular got quite messed up when he was the dealer and said that he couldn’t drink any more: “I think I’m going to jerk off,” he said. “WHAT?” we all cried out. He, of course, meant that he was going to throw up but, much to our mirth, the English idiom had failed him at a crucial moment. He obviously didn’t live that down the whole time I travelled with him.
I also ran into Tegan from Hanoi there; although she was so incapacitated that I don’t think she recognised me and I doubt that she’d ever have remembered the conversation the next day. Vang Vieng was that type of place. We carried on playing drinking games and it seemed to be Jan Zwei’s turn to get really drunk – something he did with apparent zeal as he kept giving everyone huge hints as to what card they should guess when he was the dealer. After a final drink or two at Bar Q down the road – everyone gathered on the street outside – it was time to head home for the night.
Outside Bar Q
The next day was disappointing to say the least. The Germans were all so hungover that any attempts to go tubing were met with limited enthusiasm. I decided to compromise by going to the nearby Blue Lagoon but only Yana was capable of going anywhere – the Jans just wanted to sleep their headaches off – and we couldn’t find a tuk-tuk willing to take us there for a reasonable price. So we didn’t do anything all day and eventually just settled down in one of the Friends cafes and watched back-to-back episodes.
As we sat there we saw tuk-tuk after tuk-tuk dumping off the raucous hordes from the tubing; amongst them five girls who were having a big disagreement. Everyone in the bar stopped watching Friends and instead cast their eyes on the action unfolding in the street; even the staff stopped what they were doing (although that didn’t affect the service in any noticeable way). It was the ultimate bitch fight with hair-pulling, weak slaps and high kicks and an audible sigh of disappointment spread through the restaurant when the girls ran off further down the street and the tableau was finished.
Jan and I decided to revisit the Indian restaurant for dinner and, much to my surprise, we ran into Kate and Idiet who I’d last seen in Hoi An at Jean’s birthday. None of us realised that the others were even going to Laos after Vietnam. Vang Vieng was fast becoming a crossroads where I was going to run into people from various different points of my travels: at another point in the evening I also ran into Maud who I also knew from Hoi An. We arranged to meet up the next day for breakfast so that we could all go tubing together.
It seemed to be the night for fights and crazy drunken behaviour. We witnessed a local guy who was completely sozzled and could barely stand; trying to get on his motorbike which he kept falling off, before a couple of Westerners hauled him off his bike to safety. At Bar Q, however, we witnessed the most serious event. A Westerner who was completely off-his-face (he’d been seen running naked through the streets) was in a scuffle with a local guy. At first I was full of sympathy for the Laotian – apparently the Westerner had broken into his shop and house and tried to rape his wife. But as the story carried on it seemed unlikely that much of this had happened. It was possible that he was indeed guilty of breaking and entering in a moment of ill-considered drunken behaviour but when the Laos guy said the police were coming and then his friend (who was definitely NOT a member of the local constabulary) started to get some handcuffs out I realised that it was, in all likelihood, an excuse to extort money from the most wasted foreigner in the neighbourhood. It sounded like the drunkard and the wife had never even encountered each other, so the story of intended rape was also just conjecture. The fact that the Laotian guy was also holding a brick above the other guy’s head and was preparing to hit him with it was actually quite scary. The Westerner did finally leave and headed back to his hostel so we didn’t have to witness him getting his head pounded by a large rock. After a relatively relaxed night on the booze we headed home for bed.
After meeting up for breakfast it was like herding cats trying to get everyone together ready to depart in a tuk-tuk to the first bar on the tubing circuit: it took at least forty-five minutes before all of us were assembled in the same place. Most of us decided not to actually go tubing itself – half the fun was just going on a big bar hop between the first four bars – and the chances of your tube getting stolen or punctured are apparently quite high: so we instead decided just to concentrate on the drinking. We did this in quite some concentration.
And so began two solid days of mayhem. Beers, buckets, marathon games of beer pong and horrendously high swings into the water below became the norm. We were covered in tubing “tattoos” written in marker pen or spray-painted through stencils. My back proclaimed me to be “Barry, Hairy, Quite Contray [sic]” It was, of course, supposed to say “contrary” but English is clearly only a second language to Americans so they struggle to spell it correctly. During a random conversation in Oh La La one night, I suddenly realised that Jan Zwei was in the Game of Life and we soon enlisted the others too. It was no longer okay to use the first person possessive pronoun in response to a question – I lost count of how many times I was forced to do push-ups after saying “mine”. And doing them on the floor of a tuk-tuk on bumpy roads is really not easy.
In the tubing at Vang Vieng
For our second consecutive day of tubing we all decided to get different colour Ray Bans and we were known by our colour name for the rest of the day. Anyone caught using a real name was forced to drink. I became henceforth known as “Blue”; sometimes with the additional appellation of “Gay Blue”. This became very awkward when you were talking to new people or had to remind past passing acquaintances of your own name – but I did get around this by saying “it sounds like Larry but with a B”. I ran into lots more people who I knew from elsewhere whilst we were tubing: the South African girls, Candice and Cliflyn; the Aussies, Julia and Jemima; Irish Emma and Dutch Ellen from Hoi An too. I also met American Matt who everyone else in our group seemed to know from somewhere previously and an American tour rep called Heather.
I’d love to describe some interesting anecdotes from those 2 days tubing but it’s all a bit of a drunken blur really. Maud told us later that she’d seen us all staggering off the back of a tuk-tuk coming into town singing and shouting away. We had turned into the very people that I’d seen on my first few days in Vang Vieng. At least we weren’t fighting.
After two days “tubing” we were due for a break and decided to head up to the Blue Lagoon. Jan Zwei left us that day – he had to meet some friends in Thailand. The Blue Lagoon was an ultimately disappointing experience: the water was indeed blue but it looked quite mucky and a strange oily residue covered the top. It didn’t really look like something I wanted to swim in. There were also some caves there with a reclining Buddha inside. We trekked our way up to the top of the hill up an interminable number of stairs; once again not the easiest of tasks in flip-flops and then arrived at the cave. Most of the others stayed at the top but Jan and I decided to amble down to the Buddha and then I crawled through a tiny cave system: Jan decided not to because he didn’t have a torch with him. Luckily I found a random American girl that also wanted to crawl through it. It was pitch-black, claustrophobic and often there was scarcely enough room to squeeze through. There was also the omnipresent fear that we might get lost and not be able to find our way back to the start. I’m not sure if we could have gone further but without a guide we both decided to head back the way we came. I was glad I had company in the cave anyway – I’m not sure I’d have gone so far on my own and if the batteries had run out in my torch I really would have been stuck.
Reclining Buddha
That evening we all debated whether we’d stay for one final day tubing. Matt was quite adamant that he was going to leave; Idiet seemed ambivalent and Jan really wasn’t bothered with it. However, once Kate, myself and Yana had committed ourselves to another day the others decided to join us to. In retrospect, given what happened, it would probably have been better if we had just upped sticks and moved on.
Kare and Idiet playing beer pong before it all went to hell
The bars seemed quieter that day but eventually we settled into our usual routine of beer pong (which I completely suck at) and umpteen beers as we did our usual crawl between the first four bars. On numerous occasions someone would make the mistake of saying “mine” and be forced to do 10 push-ups. Idiet and Kate were playing beer pong with a couple of Canadian guys in the second bar and, after not really feeling a great vibe in the fourth bar we decided to head back and join them. Once the game was finished, one of the Canadians grabbed Idiet and carried her towards the edge of the water – it was probably a 15 metre drop-off to the water. After play-fighting a bit at the edge he decided to push her off but didn’t take the rocks just beneath the bar into consideration. Idiet was covered in blood and screaming in pain. After we’d got her out we quickly rushed her up the hill to a tuk-tuk and put her on the floor of it. She was complaining about the pain in her arm and her ribs and kept saying that she couldn’t breathe. We needed to get her to the hospital as soon as possible but the roads (which is a liberal use of the word given the state of the rutted tracks that led down to the tubing bars) were appalling so we kept asking the driver to slow down.
It was a very scary journey. Idiet seemed to keep slipping in and out of consciousness. “Stay with us, Idiet!” we kept saying and I talked to her in Dutch in the hope that her native language might be more soothing; although I’m not really sure that Dutch ever sounds soothing. At the hospital the situation didn’t improve much either – there was another scheduled power cut in Luang Prabang so there was no way they could power the X-ray machine to see what was happening with Idiet’s chest. “I can’t breathe,” she kept saying. “I think there’s water in my lungs.” As the nurses busied themselves with stitching the cuts on her arm and head she would scream out “I need air. I can’t breathe. And don’t worry about my arm you need to look at my chest NOW.” She could also feel every needle going into her but the nurses had already given her all the drugs they were going to. It was an extremely worrying time and we had to keep lying and say that the doctors were doing everything they could. It all seemed too relaxed and haphazard for the kind of attention that we felt Idiet deserved.
Finally the power came back on and they took her off for some X-rays. We decided to phone her insurance company and see if they would fly her to a more modern and better equipped hospital in Thailand but we then encountered another problem with the hospital: there were no telephones. The nurse did offer us the use of her prepaid mobile but I doubted that she’d have enough credit for an international call so I went down the road to an Internet cafe and phoned them from there. They would cover any extraction costs but it needed to be recommended by the hospital. Eventually we convinced them to at least put her in an ambulance to the capital city, Vientiane. So Kate went back to the hostel and packed up both their things whilst Jan and I headed off to the cash machine to get the money to pay for the ambulance.
I went back to the hostel and got both my bank cards just in case I couldn’t get enough out on the one card and somewhere in all the confusion I managed to lose one of them. This was the only debit/credit card that I owned and it would cause me problems for the rest of the trip: especially when it came to booking flights home. Eventually we waved goodbye to the girls in the back of the ambulance. Yana, Jan and I planned to meet them at Vientiane hospital the next day. My plans to visit the Plain of Jars were now completely shelved. Matt was carrying on his journey up north to Luang Prabang.
The whole thing had been a very sobering experience and none of us were really in the mood to drink that night. Although I did still find myself having a few drinks in Bar Q at the end of the evening. I didn’t really know many people in town any more (most had moved on) but I did meet up with Nik again who I knew from playing Sabidee in Hanoi. Finally it was time to go to bed ready for the bus to the capital the next day.
