Laos! The Director's Cut (Part 2)

After Nong Khiaw, Antouch, Chris and I caught a couple of (slow and overcrowded) buses to Vang Vieng, south of Luang Prabang. The one big drawcard of Vang Vieng is the tubing. You pay a few dollars to hire the tube, get driven a couple of kilometres upstream of the town, and float down the river on a rubber tyre innertube, admiring the scenery and having the option of stopping for a drink at one of the many, many bars that have sprung up along the river to service thirsty tubers (the floating kind, not the root vegetable). Despite the fact that everyone I'd met in Luang Prabang had been raving about how fun it was, when I got to Vang Vieng I decided to opt out. Being the rainy season, the water was flowing pretty quickly and I could see that it wouldn't take long to do the whole route back to town. And the colour of the Mekong is a turnoff - like strong, milky tea. I didn't particularly want to sit in that water for extended periods of time.

Chris and I went for a walk out of town to an organic farm that I was keen to volunteer at (you pay US$1 a day and get food and accomodation, in return you do 4 hours work on the farm a day). Unfortunately, they weren't taking volunteers during the rainy season. The walk out wasn't completely wasted, though: the organic farm sold us a big hunk of goats cheese (drool ... so damn good). When we got back into town we rustled up a couple of baguettes and a bottle of average French beaujolais (which tasted fab to me - wine is well out of my price range usually so I'd been going without) and spent the afternoon making absolute pigs of ourselves watching the rain from the balcony of our guesthouse. So indulgent.

The most bizarre thing about Vang Vieng: the ubiquity of "Friends" on restaurant/bar TVs. Almost every single restaurant in town has TV's showing "Friends" at full blast. Most of them have their chairs and tables set up so you can't escape from facing the television. And they all show the same season (the first) so you get the same (appalling) episodes over and over. Lack of diversity is an illness in Laos: you get a row of shops, restaurants, bars that are doing and selling exactly the same thing (five tour giuides selling identical tours, a chain of seven shops selling the odd combination of rice and beauty products, eight pork noodle soup stands in a row). One person successfully opens a new business and the next person who comes along decides to mimic them exactly (and steal half their customers) rather than being innovative and attracting a different kind of custom (eg. someone who wants to eats something other than pork noodle soup!). I can only imagine that a few years ago one restaurant started on the "Friends" gimic in Vang Vieng, succeeding in pulling in a few extra customers and then EVERYONE started playing Friends (which they had pirated from the original copy). Luckily, we managed to find the ONLY restaurant in town that did not have a TV, but we couldn't escape completely: you could still occasionally hear the theme music coming from the adjacent bars.

There were only so many meals we could eat at that one restaurant, though, so after 2 nights Chris and I left Vang Vieng and headed south to Thakhek. Thakhek wasn't in our guidebooks, but it had been highly recommended by a woman we met in Nong Khiaw. She loved it for its quiet seclusion, the lack of tourists, and the sleepy relaxed feel to it. Sleepy isn't quite the word for it - dead was more like it. An ugly, industrial, concrete eyesaw. Two out of three shops were vacant with their shutters down, no nice places to sit and relax on the Mekong river, no interesting places to eat, no trees! After one night and one morning there we decided that we'd exhausted all the highlights it had to offer. Perhaps we were being unfair and if we had stayed longer Thakhek's rewards would have become evident, but I seriously doubt it. Thakhek is a hole - avoid it if you can.