Vang Vieng, ‘Happy’ St. Patrick’s Day!

We were very happy to walk across the tarmac landing strip on arrival in Vang Vieng, alas our 6.5 hour journey was via bus not plane, depositing us on an old American build air strip. It would have been a beautiful scenic trip (albeit slightly nauseous thanks to the road winding up, in and around the mountains), only for the smoke. Unfortunately our timing wasn’t great as we arrived in Laos just as they were conducting their yearly controlled tree burning in the mountains. It wasn’t so nice seeing a veil of smoke and flames hovering over the mountainside as we drove through. This was the main reason we decided to head south, as trekking in the northern region would have been unpleasant under such conditions.

We quickly found very nice accommodation, one of the nicest rooms on the trip to date for a brilliant $6 a night with en-suite and hot water! We were just as quick to discover an excellent massage place across the road to stretch us out after the cramped bus- $5 for an hours full body massage … bliss.

Where Luang Prabang was chic, Vang Vieng was more …cheap. Instead of French tour groups; it was lager louts on tour. On our first evening we were treated to a rendition of The Wild Rover belted out from the overflowing jeep of semi-naked drunken bodies. The high spirits weren’t due to the fact that it was St. Patrick’s Day eve, but this seems to be the norm around 7/8pm every evening. Vang Vieng is the place to go in Laos for Tubing and a regular stop on the backpacker route. We saw many of the people from the boat wandering around the town. You get a tuk-tuk to a tubing station on the river (or book a tour that includes tubing, drinking, lunch and a stop at a waterfall), receive a tube, jump in the river and tube down for 90-120 mins. It seems that many bars are set up en route to feed the tubers with alcohol and ‘happy shakes’. The ‘Happy Shakes’ are of the dodgiest kind, along with Happy Pizzas or pancakes or whatever. So the wild rovers in question were returning from one such tour and it seems many a happy shake and drink was had. Laos is a conservative country and all over we see posters with recommended etiquette for the tourists, the top request being to dress modestly and save the swim wear for the beach- yet here we were in the middle of a town at 8pm in the evening and there were drunk girls in skimpy bikinis getting piggy backs from drunken guys, next to their puking mate, turned ash white- looking truly ‘unhappy’…. Am some cultural sensitivity people!

The next day we were chatting to some of the locals to see what they thought about the tourists, mainly we heard that business was down this year, so any visitors were welcome, but we heard a different story from one shop keeper. On our surprised as seeing a home made poster in her store of a cartoon strip with a foreigner shoplifting, followed by him being arrested and pleading for leniency, she told us this story: She had moved to Vang Vieng a few months ago to open a clothes and nic-nack shop and each day something is stolen from the store, maybe a pair of flip flops from the front display or a T-shirt. They are stealing stuff worth a few dollars each, but the cost to her is a lot more as she can’t afford to replace the missing stock and I don’t think they go in for insurance much in that region. We felt guilty just hearing the story, apologising for the guilty parties and assured her we weren’t all like that.

After leaving the store and before renting bicycles for touring around the area we came across two almost passed out foreigners just down the road from the Irish bar. It was St.Patrick’s Day, and these two must have had a whole happy meal because they couldn’t pick themselves up from the pavement. All the locals had stopped in their tracks and were just staring, as were we. We looped back around after collecting our bikes a few minutes later to offer them some help in getting to their hotel room, as it’s been know for the police to arrest and charge anybody taking drugs and these were prime examples, but they thankfully were gone- hopefully not with the police. That drama over we high tailed it out of town for a lovely cycle around the area.

It really is a beautiful country full of caves, waterfalls, lagoons, mountains, rivers and we’re glad we got to share some of it.

Bizarrely most of the restaurants and bars in the town show ‘Friends’ all day and night until curfew, where the restaurants seem to close at 10.30 and bars at 11.30pm; so we chose our dinner according to which episode of Friends we wanted to re-watch!