Tubing

As I said yesterday a big reason that people come to Vang Vieng is because of the tubing. A typical day of tubing goes something like this:

Wake up late, no reason to get up early.

Go to a "Friends" restaurant and have a baguette for breakfast/lunch with bacon, eggs, or pretty much anything else that you want.

Get dressed in something fluorescent and or scandalous looking.

Around 1:30pm go and rent an inner tube that is then thrown on top of a tuk tuk that drives you about four kilometers down a gravel road and drops you next to the river.

Then you hop into a a small motorized boat that is attached to a cable to keep it from going down stream that drops you at a bar on the other side of the river.

Inner tubes are then thrown into a large pile with everyone else's and drinking starts at the door as everyone who enters is given a free shot upon entry.

In little less than an hour the entire bar is turned into a college party complete with drinking games like flip cup and beer pong.

After a couple of drinks its time to hop into the innertubes and get out on the river, only the next bar is 30 meters away and guys quickly throw soda bottles attached to ropes at you to pull you in to the next bar where the same things as the first bar take place, only this time everyone is well drunk.

Continue to repeat this, bar after bar until either you want to get your innertube deposit back(This must be done before 8pm) or it is too dark to tube or you are too drunk to tube.

Here is a video of some people having a good time at the second bar

We made all kinds of friends throughout the day and as the whole point was to tube, we jumped in our tubes and headed the 4 kilometers back to town.

The views along the way are really amazing, sheer limestone cliffs edged right up to the river, lots of trees and a fast moving current. When we got near to town six of us were holding on to each other to stay together and suddenly a small boy of what I would imagine was only six years old jumped off a bridge and swam with all his fury towards us. The boy grabbed our tube bundle and swam us all over towards the shore, we had made it safely back to town and the small boy of course wanted a big tip.

We had such a good time that we decided to repeat it all again only without tubes for a second day.

Check out all of the silly pictures from the two days in the slideshow below.