Vang Vieng

Now this town is something different. Absolutely packed with tourists and they don't come for the once again stunning landscape. To make perfectly clear to you what this town is about, as soon as you get out of the bus, there are people shoving a voucher for a free drink in your hand. And in the evening, when you go collect this free drink you realize that the bar across the street has free drinks from 9-10 PM. And a bit further down the road from 10-10.30 PM. And everywhere they have the equipment for beer pong or flip cup. Thus, there is a ton of party tourists here. And for the hangover induced lazy day the following morning there are a handful of bars showing endless reruns of Friends. Vang Vieng used to be famous for the drugs floating around - one was allegedly able to get pretty much anything - but government seemed to have successfully ended this. We weren't even asked if we wanted to buy anything,

But if you look beyond the party stuff, the town has a lot to offer. After we collected a number of free drinks the first night, we slept in the first morning - Sunday - and decided to head to the blue lagoon and the nearby cave. To get there one could rent a car, tuktuk, bikes, quads and even go carts - so, naturally, we walked. 7 km at noon in the blazing sun. Smart move clairsten, smart move. But once we arrived we could hop into the lagoon with seriously cold water. Very refreshing. After that we explored the cave which was really nice and huge, but nothing compared to Kong Lor really. In the evenings we stilled our slight craving for Western food with a steak for 3 EUR. That should do it for the next 3 months again... ;).

The last day we went for a hike to a waterfall through the mountainous area around the town. That was really fun cause the trip not only included walking up and down steep paths but also climbing over rocks, dipping into the waterfall basin, wading through a river a couple of times and walking through dense, 2m high grass. But another sign that most people aren't here for this kind of activity was the fact that we were the only ones to have booked said trek.

More popular are kayaking and tubing, where you rent an inflated truck tyre and just float through the river. Seems to be quite relaxing but we chose to rather go hiking in the end, which was a good decision as the nature was absolutely beautiful!

So, we really enjoyed our time in Vang Vieng and absolutely recommend it. Just get a guest house a little bit outside the city centre ;).Read more