Spring Break 2008

They say that April and May are the hottest months in SE Asia. I concur. Its been insanely hot hear in Vang Vieng. Some of the people who ran the guesthouse that the girls were staying in took us to a cave where you could swim through. This gave us the chance to cool off a little before the sun went down. But even at night its still crazy freaky hot. It turns out that if you ask anyone anything about Laos the first thing they think of is tubing down the Nam Song River. Its so well known you can google it or see it on youtube. Basically the town has turned in to a giant spring break, not what should come to mind when you talk about Laos. The population seems to consist of more backpackers than locals and many of them are laid back watching reruns of ‘Friends’ sipping their Beer Lao or ‘happy’ shakes. But if you think about it there are a lot of places in Thailand that have similar reputations. Ironically enough we met several people who had been there for weeks, even months. Either way it was a fun place to spend a little time in and have a little break from the typical SE Asian cities.

The next day went down and rented some tubes to try out the river. It’s just like tubing down the Green River in North Cacalac except for the swings. These swings are insane. There are makeshift bars alongside the riverbank where you can stop and have drinks and also swing. Depending on when you let go you can have a little as a five foot drop or as much as a 25 foot drop. The video is of Adam doing a zipline but the photo is of me (kinda hard to tell) trying to become a trapeze artist. They’re really fun but pretty intimidating as well because the river depth varies so much, but I guess they plan where they place the swing lines well enough to ensure you don’t hit boulders in the water. They have OSHA in Laos right? Well we only made it about halfway down the river before it was too dark to see so we had to jump out early to get a tuk tuk to take us the rest of the way. Oh well, we still have tomorrow. Turns out that Jessica’s friend, Mathias, was arriving the next day and it was his birthday so we suited up and went again. Once again we didn’t make it back in time even though we skipped a lot of the bars. We had to get a motorized boat to take us to the end.

The next day we decided to have a little change of pace and doing some rock climbing. Mary and Jo were pretty unresponsive the next morning so we left them and headed for the rocks. There were some pretty good climbs except when the rocks got slippery from the rain. Luckily the climbing area was beside the river so we got to do one more swing on our way out. By this time it was almost the new year so we decided to try and take the overnighter to Luang Prabang. Well we were in a rush so it turned out that only Adam and our new friend Oracle (by the way most of these names aren’t real, they’re just nicknames we gave each other along the way) were to go that night. The rest of us were going to wait until the next day and take a minibus with our rock climbing guide. Bad idea. The guide was a moron stoner from Canadia and he didn’t book the bus, what’s worse was that he didn’t have the decency to tell us. So by the time we figured out he wasn’t going it was too late to catch any other bus and we didn’t want to take the overnighter and end up there at two in the morning. The craziness continued as we had already checked out of our guesthouses but had to try and find another guesthouse for that night since idiot didn’t come through. Because of the new years there were hoards of Thais who had come over and filled all the accommodations in town. We finally came across a single room and the owner said there were two double beds. It turns out his double beds were single beds and he was charging insane prices because he knew rooms in town were limited. Long story short Mary, Jo, Mathias, and I had to somehow all squeeze in one tiny room so we all went out for a night cap to help us sleep. Turns out it was one of the best nights of sleep I had had in a while.