Vang Vieng: no place for grandmas.

Or so I thought…

I had low expectations. Its where the cool kids with their brightly-coloured sunglasses go to get high on spliff/mushrooms/opium and float down a river on inner tractor tyre tubes. The journey from Vientiane didn’t help to dispel my fears: a guy started drinking as soon as the bus left at 8am, but hadn’t thought through the whole process of liquid intake (and consequent output), so a few drunken hours later merrily stood up and showed the whole bus his 3 newly-filled bottles only to drop one of them on the floor. Hmmm…

The tourist area in VV is pretty weird. In the middle of gorgeous countryside, the town has heaps of bars and restaurants all showing repeats of Family Guy and Friends – presumably everyone is so trashed from tubing and the lure of mind-numbing entertainment is too hard to resist. That evening I got together with a couple of people I had met in Vietnam and Cambodia who had gone tubing for 5 days in a row (not as bad as one guy who was rumoured to have been on his 324^th consecutive day); they were leaving the following morning, so I was going to have to do this tubing thing on my own – a daunting prospect, like going to a party and being the geeky girl in the corner…

I put off tubing for as long as I could the next day and lay in my hammock, watching people skip past, shrieking with excitement. At about noon I reluctantly dragged myself into town to get a tube and go up to the start point. While I was signing my life away (there’re at least 2 deaths per year), I met 2 Kiwi couples who immediately attached me to them.

What a funfunfun day! The stretch of river where the tubing action happens is only about 400m long and crammed with bars on each side, each with free shots of hideous LaoLao whiskey, zip lines over the river / mud pits / volleyball / slides / music and makeshift dance floors. The LaoLao took its effect quickly and the 4 of us were wrestling in the mud, whizzing down the zip lines (I only regained full hearing in my right ear after a week as I fell off one, splattering into the water), and dancing like lunatics. It all got very blurry towards the end: it turned out that I had had a few sips of what I hadn’t known to be a “happy” mojito. Scott (one half of one of the Kiwi couples) and I somehow became detached from everyone else (totally innocently) and shivered down the river to Vang Vieng town, pulling ourselves out of the water at 10pm.

The next day I felt really strange: my body was totally battered – bruises and scratches all over from the river, and my brain had gone on holiday in a different hemisphere (not in an unpleasant way). And so I watched 4 hours of Friends like all those space cadets I had seen when I first arrived.

Met up with Clare and Scott and the other couple who were also confused about how it all got so messy, but were undeterred by the experience and asked me to join them for a joint later. My brain and I had begun a happy reunion which was quite nice, so I declined… which was fortunate because when I met them the next day they told me they had been found by the police, marched to an ATM and ordered to pay a 5,000,000kip ($600) “fine” (almost twice the yearly wage).

On my last day in VV I hired a motorbike and wobbled around the area on bumpy roads (so bumpy I had to rescue a French couple who had a puncture), watched the tubers stumbling in, and caught up with a few people in the evening for a few mellow drinks.

I left VV with a sore throat and many peculiar bruises, but grandma definitely had a good time!