Destination Laos: Part 7 Tubing!

"Off we go", drawled an American voice behind me, as the bus reversed out of its lot after the last passenger has got on board.

Reached Muang Vang Vieng a quarter to two, as expected, with a stop at Kasi. Found a nice cheap guesthouse next to the river, the Saysong Guesthouse (try to get the rooms on the bottom floor, much nicer. We got a 3 bedder with hot water for 6 dollars in total. The rooms on the upper floor are still, ahem, under construction, but still available for a paltry 3 dollars for a spacious 3 bedder, shared bathrooms down the corridor). I've never really cared that much about the places i stay in though. "Seriously, how much time do you think you are going to spend in the room?", as one Israeli puts it in perspective when we were stranded at night in Luang Prabang looking at fleapit after fleapit, having arrived after the army of backpackers got off the boat from Pak Mong - rush hour traffic for Luang Prabang, with every backpacker scrambling for rooms. That was about as rushed as it got in tranquil, somnambulant Luang Prabang, and i might add, Lao in general.

But back to Vang Vieng. At 4 the pick up, with our tractor tyre inner tubes (henceforth tubes =) tied down on the roof dropped us off at the Organic Mulberry Farm, where it was a short hop with our tubes over our shoulders before we were at the Nam Song. Beautiful, clear waters, and flanked by some really amazing karst mountains. Now if i had been here 2 years ago i might have excelled in A level geography, it left that indelible an impression on me.

Southeast Asian veterans looking at this (im pretending i have an audience here, humour me) are probably sniggering at the time we set off. 4 in the afternoon. In Lao last light is around 6 30. And guess how long a tubing tour takes - 4 hours or so. Do the maths and you would realise that we would still be and were, floating on the Nam Song past 7 o clock at night. And unluckily for us, it turned out to be one of the colder days in Vang Vieng, with it already being cold season.

By 5 we were feeling a bit chilly. By 6 we were shivering a bit, thanks to the fading sunlight and the splashing match that occurred earlier. By 7 our bottoms and hands were numb, and we were looking for the nearest river bar to evacuate to, and as Murphy's law would have it, we just left the last river bar behind. We finally got up at some muddy embankment that had this wooden sign nailed to a tree - tuk tuk to town. Saved, from a certain fate of drifting down the Nam Song and into Vientiane through the night, as one guy candidly put it.