Floating down the river in Vang Vieng

I caught a local bus from Vientiane to Vang Vieng. I thought I got to the station a good 30 minutes before the 10:30 bus but the 9:30 bus was still there waiting to fillup. I got on the bus and it left within a couple of minutes but the down side was all the regular seats were full so I was on a plastic stool in the middle of the isle. The ride was not bad until we got into the mountains and then it sort of hard to stay on my little plastic stool with all of curves. After a few hours someone got off the bus and I got a regular seat for the rest of the ride to Vang Vieng.

Vang Vieng has the scenery around it that looks a lot like a few of the places I have visited on this trip. This type of landscape was similar to Yangshuo, Halong Bay and Ninh Binh. This is a picture from the guesthouse that I stayed in Vang Vieng.

The town of Vang Vieng seems to be all about backpackers. There are areas in a lot of towns that I have stayed in that seem to carter to the backpackers but there are also tourist that are more of the normal type in those cities. Vang Vieng seem to only have backpackers and I sort of felt out of place. Vang Vieng was full of travelers under the age of 30.

I spent one day just walking down a dirt road enjoying the scenery. The following day after a short walk I decided to float down the river on an intertube. It was the dry season so floating down the river took longer then I expected. From the point on the river where you are dropped off with a tube until the town there are bars on the river for the backpackers. I did not take my camera so don’t have any pictures but all the bars had some sort of hook to try and get tubers to come in. Towers to jump off or ropes to swing out over the water and drop off of and one place had a trapezes bar. I enjoyed watching all the backpackers enjoying the different bars as I floated past. It was also interesting to see loads of these backpackers that had been drinking all day returning to town in the evening. There were trucks full of backpacker singing and laughing coming into town because they ran out of sunlight to float down the river.