We arrived in Vientiane exhausted after a 24 hour never-to-be-spoke-of-again bus and got a tuk-tuk into what we guessed was the centre of town. Vientiane is pretty small for a capital city with only about 200 thousand people, and it's the only capital city I could think of which borders another country (google tells me there are quite a few more, there's even a sporcle quiz). We spent a few days doing very little there other than drinking beerlao and waiting for the rain to stop. There was a surprisingly nice cocktail bar next to our hotel, but it was generally pretty quiet. We visited the thai consulate to get a 60-day visa, but that was going to take 4 days to process so we gave up and headed off on the (3 hour only) minibus to Vang Vieng.
Vang Vieng is a unique place. Its popularity is almost entirely built around tubing. If you come to Laos to get drunk, cheaply with a bunch of other brits, look no further! Basically you hire a big inner tube, they take you a couple of miles up the river and you float down, stopping at bars along the way who throw out ropes and help drag you in. The Lonely Planet describes these bars as 'amphetamine fuelled rave platforms' but really it's fine - more like a university freshers week.
Apart from tubing, the town specialises in bar/restaurants with low tables & cushions, playing either Friends or Family Guy on the tv. The shops were similarly homogenous, selling beerlao vests, shorts and waterproof bags for tubing. We shamelessly bought the lot. Vang Vieng, or VV, is meant to have a problem with drugs and booze. In my opinion the booze was fine, mostly beerlao with the odd cocktail bucket. Drugs-wise I was operating on a heady mix of anti-malarials and nurofen. The latter in order to stave off a man-cold that I would later pass on to Cath. We ended up spending about 5 nicely unproductive days in VV before taking a slightly hairy 7 hour coach trip north to Luang Prabang.
If Vang Vieng's typical visitor was 20 year old british student, Luang Prabang's is a 60 year old frenchman. Despite it being a bit of a pain to get to there were lots of expensive looking hotels aimed at the more discerning traveller. We spent a morning at an elephant camp, which was pretty awesome, as we were able to ride an elephant bareback into a river! It was more fun than it sounds:
When walking around Luang Prabang you are constantly assaulted by tuktuk drivers. "Boat trip! Cheap cheap" or most often just "You! Waterfall!" It's pretty annoying. What they mean by this is "excuse me sir but would you like to go to a nearby waterfall, it is very nice". We decided to rent a motorbike and do the 30km each way by ourselves, which was pretty good fun until we decided to climb to the top of the waterfall (no path) wade across the top (no bridge) and stumble down, most of this barefoot because it was too muddy for flipflops. Good waterfall though:
From Luang Prabang, we were planning to go to into Northern Thailand, after looking at the ways to get to the border, (2 full days on a boat or yet another overnight bus) and much discussion, we decided to splash out on the 1 hour flight to Chiang Mai: Luxury!
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| Number 1 thing to do in Laos |
Vang Vieng is a unique place. Its popularity is almost entirely built around tubing. If you come to Laos to get drunk, cheaply with a bunch of other brits, look no further! Basically you hire a big inner tube, they take you a couple of miles up the river and you float down, stopping at bars along the way who throw out ropes and help drag you in. The Lonely Planet describes these bars as 'amphetamine fuelled rave platforms' but really it's fine - more like a university freshers week.
Apart from tubing, the town specialises in bar/restaurants with low tables & cushions, playing either Friends or Family Guy on the tv. The shops were similarly homogenous, selling beerlao vests, shorts and waterproof bags for tubing. We shamelessly bought the lot. Vang Vieng, or VV, is meant to have a problem with drugs and booze. In my opinion the booze was fine, mostly beerlao with the odd cocktail bucket. Drugs-wise I was operating on a heady mix of anti-malarials and nurofen. The latter in order to stave off a man-cold that I would later pass on to Cath. We ended up spending about 5 nicely unproductive days in VV before taking a slightly hairy 7 hour coach trip north to Luang Prabang.
If Vang Vieng's typical visitor was 20 year old british student, Luang Prabang's is a 60 year old frenchman. Despite it being a bit of a pain to get to there were lots of expensive looking hotels aimed at the more discerning traveller. We spent a morning at an elephant camp, which was pretty awesome, as we were able to ride an elephant bareback into a river! It was more fun than it sounds:
When walking around Luang Prabang you are constantly assaulted by tuktuk drivers. "Boat trip! Cheap cheap" or most often just "You! Waterfall!" It's pretty annoying. What they mean by this is "excuse me sir but would you like to go to a nearby waterfall, it is very nice". We decided to rent a motorbike and do the 30km each way by ourselves, which was pretty good fun until we decided to climb to the top of the waterfall (no path) wade across the top (no bridge) and stumble down, most of this barefoot because it was too muddy for flipflops. Good waterfall though:
From Luang Prabang, we were planning to go to into Northern Thailand, after looking at the ways to get to the border, (2 full days on a boat or yet another overnight bus) and much discussion, we decided to splash out on the 1 hour flight to Chiang Mai: Luxury!
