After cramming eighteen people, rucksacks and daypacks onto an open back truck or 'songthaew', we left the hotel in Vientiane to catch the public bus to Vang Vieng. After some juggling of the other passengers between different buses to make way for us we headed off.
Driving north into the Laos mountains, the scenery was stunning. We passed through villages with simple houses made of wood or woven bamboo, through lush green paddy fields and beautiful tree-lined fields. Vang Vieng is without a doubt in one of the most beautiful settings in Laos with the backdrop of the mountains behind and the Han Song river running through it.
Our hotel for the duration of our stay was actually a series of wooden chalet-style buildings on stilts laid out around a garden courtyard. At night the sounds of crickets, geckos and other nocturnal creatures provided an interesting soundtrack.
If you're into kayaking, trekking, tubing, quad-biking, boating or mountain-biking you'll be in your element as Vang Vieng is a haven for all these activities. Quite a few of our group took part in kayaking and tubing and said they had a fantastic day. Otherwise, as a destination Vang Vieng has very little else to offer. It's a small, sleepy backwater that got caught up in the tubing craze and has now become a town catering almost exclusively to backpackers, arguably at the expense of its identity. A series of bars, many with day beds, show back to back episodes of Friends or Family Guy whilst serving buckets of cocktails to backpackers; every other shop is a convenience store or a shop selling flip-flops, t-shirts or sunglasses; restaurants tend to serve mostly Western food such as burgers, chips, omelettes and pizza or American style breakfasts. The locals, perhaps now bored by the drunken antics of the thousands of travellers who pass through every year are a little more detached, a little more distant in their dealings with you than the friendliness you encounter in the rest of Laos. In a nutshell, that's Vang Vieng. Same same but different. It saddened me a little.
We spent two nights in Vang Vieng. The first I spent sleeping after the heat and lack of sleep of the previous few days finally caught up with me, missing a trip the rest of the group made to the Blue Lagoon just outside the town. The second I spent drinking large measures of gin and tonic in a couple of the bars and eating disappointing pad thai at a vegetarian restaurant before going on for more drinks, buckets of cocktails and games of table tennis at yet another bar. Disappointingly, I too became a Vang Vieng cliché.
After exhausting the bars and restaurants I was glad to move on because the next place we were headed to, Luang Prabang, was one of the most memorable of the whole trip with a journey to match.