I spent longer in Luang PraBang than I had originally intended. The plan was to spend a few days there then head over to the Thai border to do 2 days on zip lines in the jungle, but the logistics seemed like too much hard work: 10hrs on a “VIP” bus which no one could tell me for certain if it existed, or 19hrs on an overnight public bus. So in the end I had a very lazy, moochy time in touristy LPB (its a little like a fancy village in Switzerland that’s been plonked in Laos: lots of tourists called Meryl or Chad with their white t-shirts tucked into their beige chinos), overdosing on wats, checking out the night market, and generally having a bit of a rest. I met up with Alicia again, so we spent most of the week together, and saw Jess (from HalongBay) once or twice. I found a guesthouse with a sundeck… well, not a sundeck per se – more like the laundry drying area – but it was sunny and it smelt nice, so I spent a few hours up there.

No remarkably witty stories to divulge, apart from my going into an internet cafe and asking if they had a printer available… only to cause much confusion before being given a panty-liner….??

I did however do a 2-day mahout training course – learning how to drive an elephant – which was really good fun, but I didn’t actually learn much, other than “HOW!” (stop!), which the elephants didn’t listen to anyway, and that when you feel like you’re about to fall off, hanging onto short spiky elephant hair will not help. First I was jostled about on the back of an elephant on a seat, and then moved up to sit on the neck to take a dip in the Mekong for some elephant washing. Its hard work though, trying not to fall off elephants and your biceps really ache after pressing on its head for a couple of hours. I had been in a group of about 8 people, but I was the only one staying for the night (on the floor of a shelter with no walls, under a giant netted cake tin lid). So after I “put the elephants to bed” in the jungle, Ticky(my guide) and I went off to the owner’s house for dinner and then back to the shelter for a few beers around the fire with Nong, a carpenter who had come to join Ticky and I for the night in case “anything-bad-happened-but-it-won’t-don’t-worry”, then under our cake tin lids for possibly the most restful sleep I’ve had in years.

The next morning a new group arrived after I had washed the elephants some more (the cleanest elephants in Laos?) who I got chatting to – they were very interested (horrified) to learn where I had slept. Have I become a scungy traveller? Should I consider dreadlocks and a tattoo? After they had been jostled around on the elephants, we all went off to visit a waterfall and then back to LPB. Met up that evening and the next few days with 2 Aussie girls, Daphne and Louise, really good fun and completely normal… not like the weird taggers-on they kept bringing along when we met up (who we did manage to shake off most evenings)

On my last day in Laos I woke early (5:15am. groan) to watch the monks receive alms. What an awful experience: all the Meryls and Chads get up early too to shove their fancy SLR cameras right in the monks’ faces, blinding them with flashes and blocking the way so they can’t get past. I would imagine it would be quite a beautiful thing to watch, but I went back to bed at 6:30 feeling slightly dirty for also having taken photos. To attempt at making amends I went to Big Brother Mouse, a place where tourists and Laos locals meet to talk so they can practise their English, talking about how old I am and where I come from.

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!

I had been cautioned that Vientiane was not the most exciting of capital cities and that definitely rang true – I did “the sights” in about 6 hours: lots of wats and a crazy Arc de Triomphe (a plaque on the wall stated “From a closer distance it appears less impressive, like a monster of concrete”. They’re such braggers, the Laotians.)

After exhausting Vientiane’s delights, I hopped on a bus to Ban Khoun Kham, a very tiny village in central Laos that sees 3 tourists a week. I arrived in the afternoon and headed off to the tourism office to pick up a guide (Keh) to check out a waterfall. Keh ran up the mountain like a goat, with me in my flip-flops trailing after him, crashing into spiders and even a snake (lucky me, apparently). That evening, while I was having dinner with the family who ran my guesthouse, 2 elephants came trumping past with a flock of little children following. The kids were actually more excited to see me than the elephants, which goes to show how remote Ban Khoun Kam is, I guess.

The next day I woke early to hire a bike and putter off to Tham Kong Lo, a 7,5km underground river in a limestone karst. Pretty stunning scenery on the way to the cave: the road runs along a fertile valley between limestone cliffs, dotted with tiny hamlets and shepherd’s huts. The cave itself was impressive – it takes 2 hours to pootle upstream in a leaking boat from one side of the karst to the other in total darkness. I did note and enjoy the irony of my spending considerable time and money to get there and sit on a boat for 2 hours on a river in complete darkness, occasionally having to get out in the river and pull the boat over rocks.

That evening Keh invited me over to the tourism office for dinner; he had made laap, a spicy meat salad. When I asked what sort of meat it was, he answered, “Sandal!” I looked down at the bowl of mashed flip-flops in front of me. “Sandal?” I asked. “No! Scandal! Scandal!”. I did indeed think it was a terrible scandal that this man had been reduced to eating footwear, but before I could say anything he leapt to the fridge and got out a very stiff, bald squirrel (it could have been rat, but I’m going with squirrel). Anyhow, it was pretty tasty whatever it was, albeit a little hot for my wimpy taste buds.

The first bus back to Vientiane was scheduled to leave at 7am the following day, so I naively woke early to catch it… when it arrived at 8:15am. Well at least it came and at least I got a seat, not a little plastic chair in the aisle, but it did mean that I had to spend another night in dreary Vientiane, rather than heading north to Vang Vieng that afternoon (missed the Vang Vieng bus by 12 minutes. Hmmm…)

So I checked back into the guesthouse I had stayed in before and wandered down the road where I met up with Alicia, the owner/manager of the hostel where Gillian and I had stayed in Hanoi. She was over with her mother and step-father and the 3 of them invited me to dinner on the riverfront; a nice, mellow end to Vientiane.