Vang Vieng is a place that burst onto the backpacking scene some twenty years ago, obtaining an almost mythical status as a party destination in Southeast Asia. The main attraction of this small town in the middle of the jungle surrounded by limestone karsts was (and still is to an extent) tubing on the Nam Song river. Tubing involves floating down the river in a tractor tyre tube, being pulled in to various bars along the way. In its heyday, dozens of tourists died each year – hardly surprising when you combine an alcohol, weed and mushroom frenzy with rapid waters. The Laos government shut down the river bars in 2012 and the community have since sought to rebrand the town as an adventure activities spot with numerous businesses opening up to provide mountain biking, ziplining, kayaking, cave exploring, lagoon swimming etc. Tubing has, since, resumed, albeit with sensible regulations going in. The town is very much back on the list as a must stop in Laos with a now somewhat more balanced crowd visiting.
We arrived in Vang Vieng in the afternoon of 5th Feb after our 5 hour drive from Luang Prabang by minibus. Along the way, we had glimpsed something closer to the “real” Laos, passing some pretty rustic villages and otherwise a lot of jungle! We also saw several glimses of the incredibly impressive looking high speed rail line being built by the Chinese, connecting China with Bangkok via Laos… While clearly a good thing in terms of boosting Laos’ connectedness to the outside world (particularly important given it is landlocked), we hope this does not lead to a huge influx of Chinese mega hotels and casinos…
We stayed for 3 nights in Vang Vieng and broadly divided our time across chilling on day 1, tubing on day 2 and touring on day 3. We stayed at some lovely stilted bungalows near the river called “Champalao”. The place is run by a couple of Thai gents and has a great chill out area with hammocks and cushions and glorious views across to the jungle-clad limestone karsts that give Vang Vieng such an iconic feel. For our first afternoon, we just relaxed here and soaked up this amazing and exotic landscape. We got chatting to a group of three Brits who had the same idea as us. The two girls were Leeds students currently on their exchange year in Ausralia while the other was a friend who wanted in on their trip to Southeast Asia – we had a great time chatting and got plenty of good tips for places to visit in Australie. Hearing about how life in Sudney had been so heavily effected with smoke from the horrific forest fires was also pretty sobering… After they headed off, we enjoyed watching the sunset over the karsts with hot air balloons dotting the sky!
Later in the evening, we went exploring around Vang Vieng – a pretty uninteresting town in itself that is totally filled with amenities for tourists (bars, restaurants, travel shops etc.). Katharine had a cheap and good Laos massage, which turned out to be the same as a Thai massage with all the associated cracking and stamping. We had a pretty forgettable “barbeque” dinner and a much better drink at Gary’s Irish Bar – this one run by an actual Irishman (possibly called Gary)! Once again it was great craic and we got chatting to a pair of Swedish girls, a Bajan (Barbadian) and Canadian bloke.
6th Feb was the day of our quintessential Vang Vieng experience and the only day of the megamoon we have allocated solely to drinking (likely the last). We had a lovely lie in in our bungalow and, after some tasty muesli for breakfast, headed off in search of tubes. Our leisurely start meant we were a little late starting, which was also compounded by how confusing it was to figure out the differences between the various tubing shops and “colours”. It turns out we accidentally signed up for “red” tubing which is not the classic route and we had been warned is less busy. (We later met people who dispelled the “less busy” rhumour but hey ho). We managed to change to the classic “yellow” tubing and eventually were on our way on the back of a truck (the Laos version of tuk tuks).
The driver dropped us off and pointed us towards the river, in case there was any confusion as to what we were meant to be doing. We launched into the river, which, it being dry season, proved to be incredibly low and slow – on occasion getting stuck on shallows. The first bar is directly opposite the launch site and was empty- clearly the party had moved on already (it was around 2pm by now). Despite the enthusiastic arm waving by a British tout and calls to join him for a drink, we continued floating downstream until we reached the second bar and met a big Swede bobbing around with a beer in his hand who welcomed us and said the rest of the group of tubers were here. A local lad, no older than 10, pulled us in and we moored our tubes and walked up the river bank to the bar. It was excellent: a wooden deck area with picnic tables on one side, a “gladiators” style wooden beam with deep pools of mud water waiting below, a ping pong table, a basketball area and, of course, a bar. There were around 25-30 people in all and we were quite surprised to hear later that “this was everyone”! It turned out to be the perfect number though: big enough for something of a party and to fill the small bar area, and small enough that it felt like everyone got to know everyone!
Upon arriving, we immediately bumped into the Brits we had met the previous afternoon – now joined by two others in their travel party (both also Leeds students on the year abroad, one of whom was based in Shanghai had been pretty much kicked out of the country with the coronavirus outbreak). We shared a “bucket” of rum and coke got straight in! We had been a little bit nervous about us being possibly older than most people there, but it turned out to ot be the case – it was a pretty mixed crowd and everyone got on incredibly easily (why wouldn’t you if you are merrily drinking in jungle / river paradise!).
After what must have been a good two hours of steadily flowing drink, chatting, games of basketball and “around the world” ping pong, we set off to the next bar! It was a surreal and really fun experience being part of a mass of people in tubes, chained together and floating down a river with enormous limestone karsts looming over you. Upon reaching the next bar, we were thrown a rope by another 10 year old and scrambled ashore. This bar had a less fun set up, but they did have a giant swing you could plunge yourself into the water from… George did it twice and the water, thankfully, was comfortably deep enough. We got chatting to another British couple here who were a similar age and had so far been in a career of seasonaire work in the Alps and beaches alternating. By this point the crowd had thinned as some of the morning punters were pretty drunk and chose to float on towards the finish line. It was also getting late in the afternoon and we knew we still had plenty of river to cover, so we soon followed suit and continued our drifting and paddling.
After briefly stopping at a floating bar without actually getting drinks, we continued on until we were flagged down by a Laotian man who was clearly there to collect us given it was too late in the day to attempt to return all the way to Vang Vieng (a much speedier journey in the wet season!). So in we piled into the open back truck / tuk tuk with around 15 of our tubing friends, we drove back to town and were dropped off outside Gary’s Irish bar. Feeling like we wanted to see the traditional tubing finishing line, we made our way over to Smile Beach bar – a cool place that really does have a seaside feel to it given the river beach – for a quick drink before it got dark, and headed back to our bungalow, past a gaggle of noisy and very excitable geese, to freshen up before finding food. We had pretty ordinary pizza which took ages to arrive and headed back into the town to continue with the day of drinking! We first stopped at our favourite, Gary’s bar, before sampling “Sakuro”, the centre of the madness of the Vang Vieng drinking scene. It was a fun but strange setup, playing a mix of western dance music and K-pop for the significant numbers of Koreans also around. We bumped into the Swedes we met tubing and had a round of beer pong with them before heading back and crashing. It had been a fun, hedonistic day and we had, thankfully, been relatively sensible on the drinking volumes so were fit and healthy the next day.
For our final day in Vang Vieng (7th Feb), we sourced a semi auto motorbike and headed off for a mini loop around the stunning karsts that dominate the Vang Vieng backdrop. We quickly discovered why so many people hired dune buggies as their exploration vehicles: the road became incredibly dusty and pretty rocky / bumpy. Nonetheless, we drove on, taking in the truly stunning scenery while trying to avoid falling behind other vehicles and eating their dust. We stopped for a couple of hours at “Blue Lagoon 3”, a beautiful little spot in the shadow of a karst where a stream has been dammed to create an idyllic freshwater pool. Swings and ziplines to plunge into water are also accessible from a platform. After enjoying the lagoon and having lunch, we hiked for 20 minutes up the karst to a viewpoint. Reaching the top entailed crawling through some pretty small channels in a cave, which were even hairier coming down… but the view from the top was beautiful: the valley below was dotted with rice paddies (albeit dry) and a forest of more karsts dominated the backdrop.
We set off once again with the plan being to stop at a series of viewpoints and caves en route back tho Vang Vieng. After driving for five minutes thought, we went over a particularly big rock, heard a pop and lo and behold we had got ourselves a flat tire! This one proved to be more complex to fix than our running out of petrol in Zanzibar unfortunately. A truck-taxi drove up who we flagged down asking for help – he said we should head to the village we had just passed about 2 kilometres back. With our rear wheel totally flat, we were not driving anywhere… A Dutch lady emerged to inspect the scene and she flagged down a dune buggy going in the direction we wanted, filled with 4 Koreans. We managed to explain to the Koreans what we needed and got a ride. Katharine managed to squeeze on the rear seat, but was in the firing line of whatever the buggy may spit back from its front right wheel (including cow poo on a particularly unfortunate instance…). George was standing on the left side, hanging on to the top. It was all pretty comical!
We thanked the Koreans and disembarked at the village (really just a handful of houses and a couple of “shops”). We tried asking 3 or 4 different locals if there was any kind of mechanics that could help us, getting quite good at miming the sound effects of a flat tire in the process. Each person pointed us in a different direction, saying they couldn’t help. After much sign language, we eventually found another truck taxi driver who was willing to put our bike in his truck and take us back to Vang Vieng for the princely sum of 300,000 Kip (about £24): a pretty vast sum in Laos. We were not exactly in a strong bargaining position so our haggling led to no avail and we agreed to take his offer on – emergency recovery in Europe would have been far more costly to be fair!
Somewhat embarrassingly, the driver proceeded to boot out two local ladies who presumably were now far less profitable than our rescue mission… they seemed happy enough so we hoped it had not inconvenienced them much! We drove to where our busted bike was and collectively lifted it up, tying it relatively securely in place. We both sat in the back, holding on to the bike to be extra safe… Our route back was exactly along the road we had planned, except we obviously didn’t stop anywhere and only caught glimpses through the dust of the beautiful surrounding scenery. On arrival at the bike shop back in Vang Vieng, the owner was very apologetic (obviously it wasn’t his fault) and also quite surprised: he had not had a flat tire in about a year! Clearly we had been very unlucky, or driving too fast, or both… We declined his offer for an alternative bike, feeling too frazzled, and paid him around £2 for the tire replacement cost.
We were hot, bothered and totally, disgustingly caked in dust, but felt unsatisfied and that we had not really seen much of the Vang Vieng area. So, we got on a tuk tuk and headed for Nam Cham, the nearest cave to town. It proved to be a really worthwhile visit. The cave itself has very much been turned into a destination, with concrete paths laid out and entrance fees. We climbed a steep staircase and explored several hundred metres of this well lit cave. Walking through to another opening in the karst, we stumbled upon a “cave temple” with a few golden Buddha statues and devotions (money and sticky rice mostly as is most common). After exploring the cave, we went for a dip in the cool clear waters at the base of the karst, where a stream exits from caves underneath before joining up with the main river. It was perfectly refreshing and cleansing after our dust bath earlier, and it was fun if a little scary swimming into the narrow cave to the point where we could no longer see further ahead!
We got back to Vang Vieng before sunset and headed to PM bar in the rooftop of one of the bigger hotels in the town centre. It was an excellent way to wind down, sipping margaritas with amazing panoramic views of the karst landscape. We had fajitas at the expat-run Mexican restaurant in town which George loved for the relative novelty but Katharine was less impressed with and headed back to crash after what had been something of a rollercoaster of a day! There was a “jungle party” going on about 2 kilometres away and we could hear through the night, but we were not tempted in the slightest given our previous day of drinking and also not having heard the best reviews from other travellers.
Three days felt about right for Vang Vieng. Tubing turned out to be a really fun and quite different experience, while the surrounding landscape is simply breathtaking (even though we had been unlucky with our flat tire and not able to fully enjoy it!). With the size of Laos and the quality of its roads (well paved to be fair but pretty small and full of cows and other rural obstacles), we had a long journey ahead of us for the next stage of our journey: a 12 hour bus rise to Thakhek in central Laos, with a bus change in the capital Vientiane.
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