"I'll Be There For You..."

Hey folks,

The view from outside my hostel in Vang Vieng

Life has gotten pretty crazy in the past few days! I arrived in Vang Vieng on Tuesday after a great night out with a friend from Israel. We checked out the bowling alley in Vientiane and played until the wee hours of the morning before we were kicked out of the place. Nice to see a friendly face after so long traveling alone...

Vang Vieng is a tourist haven and is most well known for its tubing, but there is a lot more to do than just get drunk on the river. I have been staying at a great guest house and have been paying only 30000 Kip a night ($3.50 CDN). It's a great place to meet people and it's a little bit off the main stretch so it's quieter. There's a good lounge to hang out in and they make world-class sandwiches that I have been feasting on every day. My first full day in Vang Vieng, I signed up for a kayaking tour. We started by visiting Elephant Cave which is home to a huge buddha footprint and a rock formation which gives the cave its name. Next, we checked out another cave called the Water Cave where we hopped on tubes with a headlamp and went deep into the cave (about 700 or 800 metres) using a rope to pull ourselves along. I brought my camera in with me to take some photos and on the way back, while adjusting my grip, I accidentally dropped it! I realized right away but it was somewhere on the soft muddy ground under 12 feet of water... I spent thirty minutes diving underwater and feeling for it in the pitch black, which was absolutely terrifying but I was determined, and then finally had to give up hope. When I emerged from the cave, we ate lunch and I had settled with the fact that my camera was gone forever and that I would have to purchase a new one for the last leg of my trip. But then, one of the guides came over and offered to go back in with me to try finding it with a snorkel mask. I thought it couldn't hurt and I had made a point of remembering the surroundings where I had lost it. We arrived at the spot where I had dropped it and he dived down to look. Incredibly, within five minutes of searching, he resurfaced with my camera in hand! Despite being underwater for over an hour and caked in mud, it still works perfectly! I gave him a nice reward and we continued the tour, 18km of kayaking down the Nam Song river with beautiful karstic landscapes in the background and plenty of rapids to go over. At the end of the river, we made a few stops at some of the bars in the 500m stretch which has made Vang Vieng so well known. I took a few turns at some of the jumps before we did the last few kilometres of kayaking and headed back to our respective hostels, content and exhausted...

Nice refreshing swimming grotto

On day two, I rented out a bicycle and decided to go explore some of the caves in the area and the local spot known as the Blue Lagoon. I went with the guy I met in Vientiane who I am still with somehow, however, he has gotten a lot better and is up for anything so that's always a perk for a travel companion. We stopped at a smaller cave first which had an awesome swimming grotto and then headed up the hill a little bit with headlamps to check out the bigger cave. It was massive and had lots of stairs and ladders to climb, with a ton of amazing rock formations along the way. Once we got to the end, we turned around and headed back to the opening, daylight a welcome sight! We stopped for lunch in a tiny village halfway between the Blue Lagoon and the main town, where little kids came and pointed to candy on the wall, to them too expensive but to us, less than 50 cents. They were very happy when we obliged their demands by buying them a treat to gobble down. After some delicious fried noodles and a break from the sun (it was 35 degrees at least that day!), we finally went to the Blue Lagoon, or at least what we thought was the Blue Lagoon... it turns out that we didn't actually make it all the way there but rather to one of the impostors that have sprung up in the area to take advantage of the site's name and tourists' money. Even so, the little place we stopped for a swim was nice and the scenic backgrounds were great to relax next to. That night, we met a bunch of new backpackers at our hostel from Sweden, England, and Norway and all went for dinner together. We had a delicious meal at a nearby restaurant and spent some time enjoying another thing Vang Vieng is known for: episodes of "Friends"... Nearly every restaurant and bar along the main road shows episodes all hours of the day and night, some of the places changing things up by showing "Family Guy". It's really a wonder the people in Laos aren't sick of the show but I guess they figure it brings in tourists by giving them something familiar and so it is a tradition that will last for many years...

One of the many bars on the "party" stretch of the Nam Song river

On day three, myself and three others from the hostel went to the cave just down the path from our hostel known for its many shrines and buddha statues. Before heading to main cave, we went swimming in another cave which was quite the experience, maybe one of the coolest I have had in Laos so far! We hadn't known about a swimming cave so none of us brought flashlights but I led the way and swam into the dark, using one of our cameras' flash as an aide at ten-second intervals in order to have some idea of where the walls were. I must have swum about 500 metres into the cave against the current, completely enveloped in darkness, with no natural light creeping in from the outside world. Very scary, but unbelievable unique and exhilarating! I decided to get out when I felt something the size of a small shark slither up against my leg! On the way back to the hostel, I bought what I thought was some local corn dish wrapped up in a banana leaf. I was wrong and when I smelled it, it had the smell of honey. I assumed it was honeycomb upon closer inspection, and took a big bite. Wrong again... Bitter, rancid juice squirted into my mouth and when I looked down I realized what I was actually eating: bee larvae! Not something I will EVER try again! After a quick, real lunch, we got our things together and hired a tuk-tuk to take us tubing. Unfortunately, the driver didn't tell us that we had to rent tubes in town and not at the river, so we didn't actually even use tubes the whole day but it didn't really matter; the experience has more to do with the bars. When I floated down the river on my kayak my first day, it was quite an assault on the eyes to see the over-developed stretch that has given Vang Vieng the ultimate party boost. It was almost like entering a different universe, the contrast was so strong! Something like this could never exist in a developed country simply due to safety regulations. Basically, there are bars scattered along both sides of the river and when you arrive, they give out free shots of Laos whiskey to everyone. There's mudfootball, pole-climbing, beer pong, volleyball, tons of slides, rope-swings and ziplining, people falling over dancing, and people jumping off the decks of the bars into the rushing current below. Because we didn't have tubes, we simply swam across the river, letting the current carry us on our backs to the next bar until someone threw out a tube attached to a rope to reel us in. I took multiple turns at doing zip-lining and rope swings, tried a few backflips (which have left me sore today), and danced until the sun went down. It was a crazy experience and also completely unique, much better than my time at the Full Moon Party in Thailand. Today, I have many cuts and bruises, spraypaint all over my back and front, and sandals that are coming apart from the insanity yesterday. I find it a little hard to believe that people go there every day for weeks on end to drink, party, and throw caution to the wind with silly stunts... I'm exhausted from just one day of it!

Tomorrow, I head to Luang Prabang, the old capital of Laos and a town known for its many temples. I think I might take a cooking course there and rent a bike to explore the countryside. It should be a welcome break from the craziness of Vang Vieng.

I'm home in three weeks and can't wait to see you all!

Ciao for now,

Max

P.S. Not a tough one, but name the song I took my blog title from!