There are two sides to this stunning beauty of a town.  Is Vang Vieng the hedonistic, boozing party girl or the crunchy-granola hiker?  It’s both, really, depending on what you’re looking for.  Jordan and I were mainly looking for a place to break up the long bus ride from Luang Prabang to Vientiane, and this was the most convenient stop.  A random choice that worked out quite well.

Vang Vieng for the REI crowd:

I’m not built to be a mountain biker.  I think I’m more built for drinking tea, eating finger sandwiches, and making pleasant conversation.  Nevertheless, bright and early Saturday morning we rented a couple of mountain bikes and headed off on a bumpy dirt road into the hills in search of the Blue Lagoon, a local swimming hole our guesthouse host, Joe, told us about.  More on Joe later.

 

We found the lagoon about 7 km later.  The 10,000 kip ($1.25 US) entrance fee also granted you entry to a cave/ Buddha shrine.  After we explored the cave, we went for a swim in the spring-fed pool with our new bud Sammy, then slurped down noodles and fruit shakes as we dried off.

 

That afternoon, we climbed a local mountain known as the “Pillar.”  Steep climb, but what a view at the top!  Our little tour guides, who scampered up and down the mountain like billy goats, kept us going!

 

We were in the home stretch of the bike back, and my poor butt is SO ready to get off that seat, when we had a delay caused by a massive cow crossing.  Honey,  we’re not in Atlanta anymore.

Vang Vieng for the Ke$ha crowd:

Tubing down the Nam Song river here is something of a backpacker rite of passage.  As our friends from senior year of college know, we’ll never turn down the chance to float down a river on an inner tube.  It’s gotten a lot quieter after the cops shut down all the bars lining the river six months ago.  This hasn’t stopped people from bringing their own beer, bottles of whiskey, baggies full of freshly rolled joints and Altoids tins full of harder stuff down the river with them.  We packed a couple of Beerlaos and hit the river.  We spent the afternoon floating slowly past jagged, toothy limestone karsts stretching to the horizon, scorched by a relentless, wet heat.

 

At night, Vang Viang is like a college town.  Every bar offers beer specials,  buckets of cheap booze guaranteed to make a reappearance, and lounges playing endless Friends reruns.  No decent grub in sight, just trying-too-hard Western places offering burgers, fried spaghetti and schnitzel.

 

Thankfully, Maylyn Guesthouse, where we stayed in Vang Vieng, had good food, good music, and our most colorful host so far.  Joe, the crusty Irish owner, would talk at length about sightseeing around Vang Vieng (“Don’t take anything down the river you can’t live without.  Except your missus.”); police brutality (“It’s all on YouTube, which is where I get most of my news.”); the Chinese (“Loud, pushy arseholes, but damned if they’re not good customers.”); Khmer art (“The lines are actually better, the older it is.”); erectile dysfunction (“She was rubbing up on me and I was worried about my performance y’know.  So I told her, ‘I need my pills first, darling.'”); and what may be the bane of his existence, TripAdvisor (“These people are paying 5 bob a night and expect a luxury resort.  Some f***ing boutique hotel.”).  For us, we thought Maylyn was great.  It was across the river from town, so it was quiet, our room was clean and functional, the food was tasty and Joe was good company.  We should probably go put that on TripAdvisor.

One word of warning:  Getting here via Luang Prabang requires spending all day on a bus navigating a twisty mountain road put in by the French eons ago — parts of which are unpaved and none of which has guardrails, lighting or markers — with a kid puking in front of you, and a piglet squeeling down in the luggage bay.  And that’s the VIP bus.