This Is How Awesome Happens....

If you've been to Yosemite, picture the valley and the surrounding granite walls. If you've sat looking up at the Grand Tetons, picture those. Now add a gorgeous flowing river, and heat enough to beckon you repeatedly into it. Get yourself in an old tire tube and float downriver, with the sunshine and water creating a perfect temperature. Sounds like a perfect day. It is. And in Vang Vieng, it gets better.

We were slightly skeptical going in. People said the tubing there is crazy, over the top....but worth seeing. It was all of those things. We went twice. It's like the crazy island in Pirates of the Caribbean, where anything goes. Swinging trapezes. Zip Lines. Platforms to jump off. Huge slingshot slides. Mud Volleyball. Music. Dancing. Before you do any of this, you're required to buy a drink. The drink of choice? Buckets. Sand pale style buckets with ice and anything else you want inside. With this liquid courage, people get after it. We luckily didn't see anyone get hurt, but we there were close calls (none involving us).

Our tubing lasted two minutes...until a rope fell across my lap, and a smiling Lao man pulled us over to a riverside bar. We were greeted with shots of whisky lao lao (which tastes terrible), shared a mojito bucket (which tastes great), got coupons written on our bodies to grant us free drinks at the nights festivities, were headbanded, wristbanded and welcomed whole-heartedly into the tube culture. The human flinging contraptions we gazed at with trepidation just five minutes before suddenly became our friends.

We absolutely fell in love with one of the huge trapezes. It's like being a kid, on the biggest swing you can imagine, only bigger. This time, you hold onto a water ski handle and get to let go at the apex of the swing with only healthy amounts of fear, falling less than gracefully to the water. We tried our hand at mud volleyball, slung ourselves off slides, and floated halfway down the river (it is slow going...only the most stubborn, or least alert, seem to make it). Jenn's brilliance garnered us a motorized boat ride home, some delicious Indian food with a great couple we shared the day with, and in what was probably best for everyone, and early night in bed.

Vang Vieng has legends. Take the guy from Canada who came last year for a planned 3 days and never left. He's allegedly tubed everyday since and can no longer hold a normal conversation. Most of the bar managers appeared to be in the same boat (except they are too easy to talk to).

From what we could tell, days of the week make absolutely no difference but the time of day does. The riverside music comes on at 9am, and the tubing bars get crazy close to 2. As tubers work their way down the river, upstream bars fade and downstream bars come alive in a logical sequence. The tube bar music is done by sundown.

Before, during and after the river chaos, backpackers veg out to endless re-runs of "Friends" and "Family Guy" in bars that specialize in one show or the others. People cheerfully bring their tubes in before 6pm (when it is still warm outside), and drunkenly after 7pm (when its not). On the "other side" of the river, Bob Marley plays every day at 5pm. Free buckets are given out before 9, and the music rocks until 3am. The place is completely insane.

A younger friend we made on the trip, from New York, put it best when he said: "this place is beautiful, but nobody notices". We noticed, and boy was it awesome. And, no surprise, that friend is still there.

Here are some new photos. Enjoy (we sure have)!