At first, the sheer ease of travelling in Southeast Asia came as a pleasant shock. After flying in from Calcutta, Bangkok’s budget hotels seemed exceptionally clean, and were as affordable as their Indian equivalents. We didn’t need to trek halfway across the city to buy bus tickets from dingy ticket offices filled with aggressive queue jumpers; they were sold by agents for the same price. We spent our first month between Bangkok and an idyllic island in the Gulf of Thailand, without any of the familiar hassles and challenges of travel, and when our Thai visas expired, we continued into Laos. My thoughts often turned to India and the twelve months I’d spent travelling there, testing and tormenting myself on long sweaty journeys to vast, polluted cities where a concrete box with a creaky overhead fan was often all I could get for my money. Had all the hassles and challenges been worth it?
The day I arrived in Vang Vieng the answer slapped me in the face. Or, rather, a few dozen pairs of barely-bikinied breasts slapped me in the face, closely pursued by as many pairs of luminous shorts, emblazoned with Vang Vieng, In the Tubing.
Vang Vieng is famous – in Australia. To most eighteen year old backpackers – and like-minded twenty-somethings – Vang Vieng is the highlight of any coming-of-age jaunt around Southeast Asia. To other travellers, it is a small town in northern Laos where people hire rubber tubes and float down the Nam Song River, stopping at ramshackle bars along the riverbank to drink buckets of whiskey and coke, or truly test their endurance with opium-laced cocktails or a bucket of magic mushrooms blended with fruit juice, hoping to god they won’t need to swim. Several travellers die every year, most from drowning or cracking their skulls on a rock. There are several tragic stories of people swimming after runaway tubes, only to disappear in the current – for the sake of a seven dollar deposit. Some float their way to the end of the tubing course in the dark, having lost track of time, and are robbed by groups of teenage locals who pretend to be helping them ashore.Everything we’d heard about Vang Vieng warned us to steer clear – and we’d had every intention of doing so, but a few days before leaving Laos’ capital, Vientiane, Iain and I saw a postcard labelled Blue Lagoon, Vang Vieng. It was an image of an immodestly blue body of water, glassy and clear beneath knotted trees, and fringed with bushes, leaves and more trees of assorted greens. Three lengths of rope hung temptingly into the water from a branch above, each with a wooden swing-seat at the end. Vientiane was scorching; the sun was hot enough to burn my skin during a fifteen minute walk to lunch. The thought of submerging ourselves in that pool of cool water was, quite simply, irresistible.
Claire van den Heever, Old World Wandering | Read more:
