This place is truly beautiful: imagine rice paddies surrounded by towering limestone cliffs, all sitting on the banks of a gently flowing river. One could easily get holed up here for days on end, just reading a book and enjoying the beautiful surroundings. Such an outcome was not in the cards for us however, as we came to Vang Vieng for one thing and one thing only: Tubing! Ahh, glorious tubing. What’s tubing you ask? Well, let me tell you. Tubing is the year-round spring break party that would occur in a first world country if lawyers weren’t allowed to sue anyone. It’s one of those things where you look at it, tell yourself, “I dunno… that looks really sketchy”, and then say fuck-it, slam your free shot of moonshine and climb up a 40 foot rickety bamboo structure to jump back into the (shallow) waters below. That’s tubing, and it is a serious hoot. Sure, there were numerous warnings around town and in the guidebooks about people getting hurt and drowning over the years, and we saw a bit too many bruises / sprained ankles / stitched legs for our comfort… but we told ourselves we wouldn’t do anything too stupid (wink), and set off to get our river party on.
We rented a bunch of tubes and headed upstream a few km to begin our aquatic pub crawl at about 11am in the morning. The party was already in full swing (literally), with ad-hoc bars lining both river banks offering free shots of this-and-that to entice floater bys in to spend more money. The scene had a bit of a circus feel to it with swings and zip-lines crisscrossing the water and drunk hooligans flying in the air attempting to perform back flips. It was still early in the morning, so we decided to pace ourselves for a bit and float downstream to just enjoy the show. After about 40 minutes I was getting a bit thirsty, so we stopped off at our first bar to get our free shot of lao-lao (some sort of distilled rice wine) and a few beer laos to warm up. For our viewing pleasure, a group of local tubers were chasing beers with swings across the water from some questionable platform. Ward and I gave each other the “I’ll go if you go” look and proceeded to climb the ladder for our completely safe (right?) swing over and into the river. 
Next stop, slide bar… just like it sounds, its a bar with a big-ass slide on it. This one was insanely fun as the slide was so high that you would get launched about 30 feet out into the river (at one point they poured some soapy water down to make things even faster!). Think Olympic long jump skiing but only on water! That was the slide. If you go over the the picasaweb page to view the pictures, keep an eye out for the stop-frame sequence of Ward going down the slide. It’s totally awesome! We spent a serious portion of our day just sitting here, drinking beers, and sliding down uncontrollably. 
Stopped at many many other bars along the way… each with something a little bit dangerous, but fun to try. Way too many bars apparently, as we somehow turned a 2 hour drift down the river into a 7 hour drinking expedition… making us late for our tube drop return and costing us a few extra bucks in the process. Oh well, it was worth it for the day’s entertainment.
What else? We did a bit of hiking out here which was pretty spectacular, but at this point I’m too brain dead to write about it. It’s hard to be eloquent when writing two blogs in a row in a condensed time frame. Maybe check out the photos online and let the pictures tell the story… Good Times.
Map of Vang Vieng (Click Here)
…and the photos, Check them out :o): http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/VangVieng
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Hey guys that looks like a lot of fun! I sure wish we were there with you! We do some tubing in Phoenix on the salt river. Rich, it's great that Ward was able to meet you. I often think of my friends & family when we are travelling and wish they could experience some of these wonderful things we are blessed to be experiencing.
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