In the pursuit of fairness, I must admit that I only spent one night there. We were hoping to see some of the surrounding scenery which is supposed to be pretty impressive but we hated the town so much that we decided to leave and bought a bus ticket out of there, within about 4 hours of arriving.
All the elephant pants one human being could ever need. They had lost our reservation and we were left in limbo as to whether they even had a room for about 20 minutes while they shuffled paper and avoided eye contact. Wishing we had packed earplugsβ¦. What kind of person gets a car spray tattoo? We decide to go out and explore, letting the natural beauty of the landscape and the charm of the town win us over. This would have been a perfect plan except the natural beauty was hidden behind hotels, bars and building sites, and the town has no charm.
We stroll around town watching people stagger back from their boozy tubing days out. I despair at a girl stood at a burger stall eating her burger, in only a bikini, at 7pm at night. We check out the bars along the river front which are famous for showing constant re-runs of Friends; they seemed to have an aversion to chairs, opting for seating that reminded me of cattle pens with a few cushions strewn about.
Bars along the riverfront love Friends and hate chairs. I get hanger very quickly, and easily, so I would have lost my control and temper pretty quickly, I think. So true about Vang Vieng. We managed to stay several days though and found that it was possible to enjoy ourselves there by doing things in the mornings while the drunkards slept off their hangovers.
The town was actually quite quiet in the mornings. We also went in October just after the government had shut down some of the bars along the river. They had apparently been serving beer with opium in it and after there were several deaths, foreign governments put pressure on Laos to do something about it.
