Vang Vieng...where the young come to party

29 - 30 January 2015

We boarded a van with about 20 other Westerners for the 100 mile, 4 hour ride.  That is right....we will be averaging 25 miles per hour because the road twists and turns up and down a mountain road for the entire trip.  Although the road was rough, the scenery was beautiful and then when we arrived in Vang Vieng the scenery wasn't too shabby there either:

View out or hotel window.

View from our hotel room.

Back in the 2000's Vang Vieng was know as party capital of Laos.  Young backpackers would come here for cheap rooms, cheap beer, and illicit drug use.  Another popular past time was to float down the river in inner tubes stopping at all the makeshift bars along the way.  This party atmosphere ended after 2011 when 27 tourists died due to drowning or diving head first into rocks while under the influence.  Today the inner tubing continues, but the drug use has ended.  What do people due here instead?  We watch Friends where not one, but two restaurants play the DVDs non-stop all day and night:

After a few BeerLaos and multiple Friends episodes we called it a night and headed back to our hotel room.

The next morning we rented a couple of scooters to ride the West Vang Vieng Loop, a 15 mile loop of beautiful scenery, but with a bumpy dirt road to go along with it.

Along the way there are multiple caves you can stop and explore, but we just continued around the loop with and made only one stop at the "Blue Lagoon" where the highlight is a blue lagoon with a tree to jump off of and a cave:

I jumped off the bottom branch, but not the top. It is pretty high up there.

On our way back to town we had our first sighting of re-appropriated bomb.  More information on these bombs to come in the next few blogs:

After an enjoyable day we got back to town, had a couple of BeerLaos, ate dinner, and called it a night.  We have a long 170 mile, 8 hour trip to our next stop, Phonsavan to visit the Plain of Jars.