Vang Vieng - taken down by one of our own

After a month of living dangerously, dining out at street stalls, pointing at unknown foods and saying "yes please, I'll have some of that," munching on hairy pieces of pork, and thoroughly enjoying every minute of it - we were finally taken down by one of our own.  Craving a bit of a change from rice and noodles we decided to treat ourselves to something delicious, familiar, and undeniably western - steak and ale pie and chips.  Yum. Seemed like a great idea at the time but what followed suggested otherwise.

We spent the next 48 hours inside our room.  Well, that's not entirely true.  We surfaced briefly to move to another guesthouse just down the road so that we could have the luxury of television to occupy us when we weren't on the toilet.  Based on how we both felt we knew that we'd be bunkering down for a while so we justified the extra expense.  Incidentally, the Domon Guesthouse in Vang Vieng is a lovely place with big, bright, and airy double rooms with ensuite bathrooms and satellite TV for only 80,000 kip.  Highly recommended for the sickly and happy and healthy alike.

Despite our condition, we still managed to squeeze in some fun while in Vang Vieng.  The most popular activity in town is getting as drunk as possible while tubing down the Nam Song River.  It's basically spring break SE Asia.  We decided to give that a miss and go for something a little more, er, sensible.


We booked a 1-day excursion with a company called Wonderful Tours.  All the companies seem to offer pretty much the same excursions for similar prices but this outfit seemed to be the most organized, and besides, we liked the owner who was full of energy and spent about 20 minutes persuading us that his company was the BEST in all of Laos.


He was a man of his word.  We really enjoyed the tour.  We spent the morning tubing through a cave, then after lunch we kayaked about 10 kilometres back to town, with a brief stop for some "carb-loading" at one of the many bars that line a small section of the river and mainly cater to the aforementioned tubing crowd.  The whole day cost us 100,000 kip each and was well worth it.