Vang Vieng – In the Tubing

Camera tricks and cattle in central Laos.

After three weeks of travel so authentic and off-the-beaten-track that even a Lonely Planet writer would nod sagely in approval, I needed a bit of trash – a place where you don’t need to eat the food, talk to the locals or wear a shirt. A place where Family Guy reruns, grilled sandwiches and marijuana are so plentiful I could be in a student share-house. I needed a place where tube is used as a verb. I needed to get some laundry done. I needed Vang Vieng.

This town in central Laos is blessed with sheer cliffs, stunning jungle, green paddy fields and clear streams. My 1996 Lonely Planet guide book describes it as a village at the end of a bad road where you can meet some locals. Well, not anymore my friends. It’s now Laos’ number one party spot. Kind of a water theme park for people who like to drink a litre of whiskey and have sex with each other. The only local you’ll meet now is the lady selling you magic mushroom pizza at 1am. And thank god for that. I’d fucking had it up to here with natural beauty and foreign types. I wanted to hang out with teenagers from Essex and talk about sunglasses and orgasms. Or Californian college boys who like my accent and want to know which part of Europe I’m from. French guys who say… Well I never really know what French people say, I just switch off.

I was looking forward to it.

A detached headlight on the way to Vang Vieng.

I just had to get there first. The only thing about the place that hasn’t changed since 1996 is the road. The problem is not that it’s particularly bad – I’d had much tougher going in parts of Vietnam – but that it’s a lot worse than it looks. After chugging along at my customary 70kph on fairly reasonable tarmac I’d round a bend to find a pothole so deep I could seeing boiling magma at the bottom. In one hole I discovered a hitherto-unknown species of troglodyte amphibian and had to free-climb to safety. I managed to swerve around most of these behemoths but as I pulled out from a cloud of dust to overtake a bus at 80kph I knew I was in strife. It was about a foot deep, two feet long and 10 feet in front of me. I knew enough not to brake and instead rapped on the throttle and pulled back on the handle bars as hard as I could, shrieking in a manly fashion. The front wheel lifted just enough to skip over the ditch but the back tyre hit the far side of the ditch with an unhappy thud. I stopped at the side of the road to reattach my lips and perform some minor surgery on my pelvis and noticed that my rusty steed’s headlight had fallen off. I got out my toolkit, screwed the light back on and set off.

It wasn’t until a passing truck enveloped me in dust that I realized I’d lost my sunglasses. By the time I got to town an hour later I may have well have had my eyes surgically replaced with a raccoon’s testicles for all the good they were doing me. After I’d showered and scrubbed my corneas with an old toothbrush, I hit the street for a traditional Laotian club sandwich and an episode of Family Guy. I was home.

I now had six days before an unmissable appointment with a pretty blonde in Bangkok. I needed to sell the bike. Incredibly for a vehicle that spelled its own name incorrectly on some components my $230 bike had covered around 2500km in 15 days. To say it didn’t miss a beat would be unwarranted hyperbole (and as you can see from the above paragraphs, I detest hyperbole) but it had gone from the sea to the mountains through all kinds of weather from rain and precipitation to showers and downpours – I think one day the sun even shone – and lived to tell the tale. I gave the old girl a service, adjusted stuff, lubricated other stuff and washed her. I then bought a Laos SIM card, stuck a couple of signs over the headlight and the packrack, and parked her on the street. She sat there glinting invitingly, her gently askew handlebars seeming to say, “buy me big boy, buy me now.” I was sure it would sell. It was time to tube.

           

Saucy minx.

 Now as a few veteran readers will know, you can’t just go tubing. No. Like all the best social occasions tubing has a dress code – fake billabong board shorts, the more lurid the better, a white singlet 4 sizes too big that reads ‘In The Tubing, Laos’, and most importantly, fake ray-ban sunglasses in any primary colour you wish. Optional extras for the more seasoned tubinger include tribal tattoos, dreadlocks and found objects jammed through earlobes. Sadly I had only packed clothes that a human being would wear. It was time to go shopping.

The next morning, resplendent in my new outfit, I walked down to a tin shed stacked full of inflated truck inner tubes, signed a waiver in case of serious injury or death, jumped into the back of a small truck with ten strangers and drove to the starting point.

Basically tubing involves jumping into a swift-flowing river and floating downstream from bar to bar drinking local whiskey or vodka mixed with red bull, soda and whatever else is in the ice box, swinging over the river on huge rope swings and flying foxes and, at one bar, sliding down an enormous tiled water slide which spits you out twenty feet above the water. Eventually you float back to town, return your tube and, if you are capable, go to the pub. A couple of hundred people do it everyday, floating in groups of newly-made friends, bumming each other’s dry cigarettes. Very few are over thirty. There are no designated drivers.

          

At the tubing.

 Like most traumatic memories, tubing comes back to me in unconnected snapshots.

 It’s dark and I’m racing my new American friend downstream, paddling hard and giggling. We notice the Serbian bloke we’d been drinking with is, unaccountable, trying furiously to paddle upstream, away from town.

“You’re going the wrong way!” The American screams.

“And you paddle like a Bosnian prostitute, you Slavic fucker!” I add helpfully.

“Fuck you, English.” Touché.

He told me later that he’d paddled for hours thinking he was heading back to town and ended up in a rice paddy. Bedraggled he knocked on the farmer’s door and begged a lift to the pub.

It’s still early and I’m easing into the afternoon with a beer and watching some lads backflip from the top of a rope swing about 20 feet above the river. One guy bottles it and doesn’t release at the top of his arc. He swing back towards the rocky bank and lets go, hitting the water head first. He resurfaces with blood pouring from a cut over his eye.

“Fookin’ hell,” he says as his mates pull him out. He’s missing a tooth. 15 minutes later the bleeding’s stopped and he’s necking a whiskey bucket and dancing to Lady Gaga.

Sometime later I’m drinking with two Americans and a German by the river near town. The yanks eat from a bag of magic mushrooms. I stick to beer. The police pull up and Fritz and I quickly explain that we’ve not been partaking. The barman backs us up and we bravely scarper. The Americans spend the night in a Laotian police station watching the walls move. They have to pay a $500 fine – i.e. bribe – to get their passports back.

After three days of this I have the liver function of Montgomery Burns and the mental cognizance of an apricot. No one has even looked twice at the bike. I decided to try my luck in Laos’ capital, Vientiane.

The aftermath of a previous tubing outing.