Vang Vieng: Koh Phan Ngam in the Countryside

VIENTIANE: Vang Vieng, by all accounts, was a sleepy little Laos village that, with the advent of tourism in 1999, was blessed by its location close to the Nam Song river and the dramatic limestone mountains that dominate it's horizons. Now it's "Spring Break: Laos Style". With a main street featuring almost wall-to-wall restaurants serving up identical Western food to the soundtrack of televisions blaring out endless reruns of "Friends". Sounds just like a fabled Shangri-La doesn't it?

Actually the place wasn't so bad but it's not exactly my scene. More for the 19-year-olds on a beach holiday excursion crowd. At times it literally felt like schoolies. Still it wasn't all just about the main street and on my first day I hired a bike with John, a Welsh guy I met in Huay Bo, and we biked out to visit a number of caves and beautiful turquoise lagoon teeming with fish.

The second day I turned my hand to Vang Vieng's signature attraction: tubing. Floating down a river with your arse in an inflated tyre. Not so exotic for any Australian who likes going camping. Still it's the thing to do in these parts so I parted with my kip and headed off river in a tuk tuk. While tubing may once have been as simple as plonking into the tire and floating down the river, it's now a thriving business built around a network of bamboo bars. One of these, a multi-story behemoth, was packed to the rafters with drunk teens and even included a volleyball court and a table tennis court. All the big ones feature massive rope swings or flying foxes, so that was a positive. And they all pump out Bob Marley or crappy house on these enormous sound systems. It's somewhat surreal to float around the bend of a sedate river to be accosted by 200 drunken revelers chanting along to Underworld's "Born Slippy" while somebody flies through the air on a trapeze.

I don't want to sound too condescending. I had fun and I was going to go again today but when I woke up I wasn't feeling the best so I just hopped town instead.