My up most apologies people for the delay in posts of late but you know how it goes, time runs away with you when your having fun!! =D
So I have found my idea of heaven on earth, or as close as I feel it can come any way!
After that shocking bus journey, my last post, we arrived in Laos. Now, how do I describe Laos!? Well for those of you who have seen Jurassic Park, the opening of the movie when you get those amazing views of the island where they have all the dinosaurs, yep well that pretty much sums up what the landscape in Laos is like, minus the dinosaurs, OBVIOUSLY! It is amazingly green and mountainous, it is the MOST beautiful place I have ever seen, the bus journeys around that place are never boring, there is soo much to see looking out the window, like; waterfalls and palm trees and obviously massive sloping landscapes, that before you know it the 4 or how ever many hours have passed. Guessing there is already no need to tell you that Laos is by far my favourite place and I haven't even told you what we got up to!!
Our first stop was the capital of Laos, Vientaine. This place is exactly like arriving in Paris, very chic and full of little bistros and cafe, coffee shop places. We were only here for a few days but it was lovely and OH MY GOD, the people are just great, the total opposite to the Vietnamese, well North Vietnamese.At one point I found myself wondering around at 6am as I could not sleep, all other signs of travellers were non-existent it was just me and the locals and a few asked if I was ok and then i sat down and had a cup of tea with one of the ladies who ran a Cafe. Other than the people the other most refreshing thing about Laos is that they do not continuously beep their horn every second, in fact i think i heard 3 beeps in the entire week we were there!
We made our way up into the mountains to one of Laos most famous towns, Vang Vieng, the home of tubing!! We stayed in a great little place called Vilayvong, and our room had beautiful views of the jagged mountains that surrounded us. As the title of this post says, it is extremely laid back in Laos, soo much so that when you go to a restaurant, along with your menu for food and drink, you also get a 'specials' menu. This menu gives you a great selection of different ways to enjoy, Opium, Weed and Magic Mushrooms. Yep drugs! Basically in Laos as long as an establishment has a license to sell such things and people only take them in these establishments, there is absolutely NOTHING illegal about any of it!! (Nice to know for some of you!) So your sat chilling on cushions around a low table, listening to Bob Marley, drinking your beer and eating a real meal, or a Happy Pizza (magic mushrooms is the key ingredient) or just casually smoking a joint and enjoying life. Obviously you can just skip the drugs all together and just enjoy this in this strange but relaxing atmosphere, but i will keep you guessing on what i decided to do! ;-)
However, this is NOT the main attraction of why people come to Vang Vieng, it is, as i said earlier because of the tubing. Now for those of you who do not know what tubing is let me inform you, basically, you get driven 5 kilometers out of town with a big tube, get in to a river and float down, at intervals you get thrown a rope from a guy at one of the many bars on the bank and you hoist yourself up, enjoy a bucket or two and a few homemade whisky shots, mud volleyball or zip wire into the river and then off you go again back into the river on your tube. The last bar (Bucket Bar) is right back at the start of town. Yes it does sound dangerous and yes it it if your not sensible and get too intoxicated, but believe me even if you did it and did not touch one drop of alcohol the views are most certainly worth it. I found myself floating down the river by myself as I had managed to float out of the current and everyone else was way ahead, but i just sat in my ring and took in all of the stuff around me. It was brilliant and I am glad that I did it, I also met some great people on that day and made it back to town before night fall and got off at the last bar (if you miss this your a bit unlucky as there is a small waterfall a few km after wards, eek!!!)
We enjoyed our stay in VangVieng soo much that we ended up staying there much longer than we planned and did not get to go any further up Laos as we needed to get into Thailand!
x
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