Vang Vieng: Part Three

Vang Vieng by day – tubing without the tubes

To tube, or not to tube, that was the question.

Tom and I couldn’t decide whether or not to brave this rite of passage, so to help us make our decision we decided to do a bit of recon whilst simultaneously trying out a cool-looking activity. We went kayaking down the Nam Song river.

A tuk tuk took us 10km up the river out of town, and the plan was that we would kayak back. The tubing part of the river made up the final 3km.

It was an excellent decision. For 2/3 of the trip the only people on the river were us and our guide, and one other small group cruising down the other side. Occasionally a motorboat would speed past us but it didn’t disturb the tranquillity of the hills on either side of us, the water sparkling in the sunlight in front of us, and the sound of birdsong all around. It was beautiful.

Eventually, the familiar doof doof of dubstep and bass alerted us to the start of the party section of the river. Bars perched on wooden platforms emerged along the riverbanks, but at 11.30am it was still pretty early – most tubers didn’t start ‘til after 1 or 2 in the afternoon. However there were still a few people out there. We saw three tubers up in front of us. Wall-E flashed through my mind again. I snorted. They looked pretty comical, as they weren’t moving very fast, or at all really. This was dry season so the river was quite low and there wasn’t much of a current; not so much an obstacle for us in our kayaks with our nice long oars, but these guys were a bit stuck. Literally. With their bums jammed firmly into their tubes and little control about the way they were facing or the speed at which they were moving, they looked like bugs on their backs, splashing around and flailing their limbs in the air completely ineffectually. One guy had resorted to putting his hands in his trainers and using them as makeshift paddles but it just made him look even more hilarious. We waved at them as we glided easily past. Suckers.

One thing quickly became apparent. The bars weren’t all that numerous – maybe about ten in total – and they were all bunched up towards the beginning of the tubing section of the river. There was also a bridge you could cross on foot to get to both sides. But after that: nothing. So, were you to choose to go tubing, you would have to get all your drinking done at the beginning and then spend about two hours floating down the river, at the mercy of the almost non-existent current, very, very slowly to get back to town. I mean, I could see how, on a lazy, sunny afternoon it could be relaxing, but there was also the risk that you wouldn’t make it back in time to recover your deposit.

We figured it was just as relaxing seeing the river from the safety of our kayak, and actually the most scenic parts of the river were already a ways behind us. So the decision was made. We would go tubing without the tubes.

Q Bar – the carnage begins

The next day, we hopped off our tuk tuk and headed towards the river, over the bridge to the first stop: Q Bar.

A smiley blonde girl motioned us over to have a free welcome shot of whiskey. Once again, it was foul, but she gave us both a free bracelet as a reward.

Bracelets were something I had already seen a lot of round SE Asia. They seemed to be pretty popular with young, hippy travellers, and now I had one. I was cool too.

It certainly made me think about the folks I saw who had about thirty bracelets all the way up their arm, proudly parading them for all to see, badges of honour displaying either their ability to travel or their ability to drink copious amounts of alcohol and not die in the process. How many free shots had those guys had??

We bought a couple of cans of BeerLao and settled ourselves down on the edge of the first wooden platform to observe the carnage below. The party was definitely in full swing. Beside us, a fiercely competitive game of beer pong was underway. Down below, on the lower ‘deck’, a half-naked British guy in a pair of sawn-off shorts, wearing his cap tilted obnoxiously down to one side, was orchestrating the drinking games from his own little elevated platform.

“Right, guys!” he said. “We’ve got a pair of free buckets to give away, to the first two girls, to come up on stage, and give each other a passionate kiss. For ten seconds.”

A ripple of giggles and cheers rumbled from the crowd. I looked at Tom. I didn’t think this was going to be a game I was going to partake in.

Two girls took the bait. I wasn’t sure whether they already knew each other but, sensing a little bit of awkwardness, I guessed not.

“Give it up for the girls!” shouted the MC. “Now remember, girls, ok. It has to be passionate, yeah? And it has to last for ten seconds.” He held up his stopwatch. “Ready?”

Ah, the things people will do for free booze.

About five or ten minutes later, the MC announced the next ‘game’. A free bucket would be given to two victors – the first girl to come up onto the platform waving her bikini top in the air, and the first guy to come up onto the platform waving his board shorts aloft.

There was an indifferent silence from the floor. Nobody seemed interested in this one. Apparently lesbian snogging was alright but perhaps not enough alcohol had been consumed by this point to facilitate public displays of nudity.

The MC was quick to berate the crowd. “Come on, guys! If this were Ibiza, you’d all be naked right now!” In a quick show of support, one of his girl lackeys on the platform lifted her top and brazenly flashed her pierced, double A’s to the crowd. It was a challenge, alright.

Meanwhile, I was struggling to understand his logic. Because we weren’t in Ibiza. We were in Laos. And as with most other Asian countries, modesty is championed and the exposure of bare skin is frowned upon. Wearing strappy tops and short skirts or shorts is bad enough, especially near places of worship, but bare breasts or chests and any floppy, dangly bits of any description is a definite no no.

I couldn’t help but feel that if we were in France or Ibiza or another European party destination as he was suggesting, it’d be absolutely fine. I’m not a big prude or anything, and I feel it’s within people’s rights to cover or show as much skin as they want, but I also feel you should try as much as possible to display a bit of cultural sensitivity when travelling abroad. Which is why I have little sympathy for people in, say, Dubai, who get arrested for having a cheeky fumble on the beach when they think no-one’s looking.

But then I thought, OK, yes, we were in Laos, but how much was really Laotian about this place? What it was, was one massive, no-holds-barred piss up, that just happened to be in Laos, and I felt like I was probably the only person ruminating on whether elements of it were acceptable or not.

These were the thoughts that were ping ponging back and forth in my mind as, finally, one reluctant-seeming but game girl in the crowd decided to rise to the challenge. Egged on by her mates sitting safely on a rattan mat by the water’s edge, she undid her bikini top from beneath her t-shirt and held it high, with her other arm placed protectively across her chest. She wasn’t naked, but she was effectively braless and clearly wanted to guard against the see-through potential of her top.

But she wasn’t going to get her free bucket this way. The MC and his lackeys were unimpressed by her shy display of modesty and insisted she lift her top up all the way so that everybody in Q-Bar could see her boobs. She protested, but they were adamant. No boobs, no bucket.

I shook my head. It seemed clear to me that she didn’t really want to do that, but after about 5 minutes of wrangling and cajoling and back and forth she eventually acquiesced, hiked up her top for two seconds, and then ran away, laughing, with her hand over her mouth in shock and/or embarrassment at what she’d just done/been made to do.

And that’s where I started to overthink everything again. Why did this make me so uncomfortable? Was it the general cultural wrongness that I’d just been reflecting upon? Was it the fact that there were young Lao men at work in the river, either pulling in punters with the aid of plastic bottles on long ropes, or stacking tubes, or collecting bottles, and all I could think was what they could possibly be thinking about the madness taking place all around them? Maybe they didn’t really care. After all, everyone needs to put food on the table, and a job’s a job. Perhaps they were amused, perhaps they were shocked, or perhaps they were just indifferent. Either way it bothered me that this could potentially make up the majority of dealings they have with Westerners, and that they could be forming the majority of their perceptions and assumptions and opinions about us based on that. I felt self-conscious, like I was the one who had just flashed the crowd and flouted all socio-cultural norms in the name of ‘fun’. What must they think of us?

Then I realised the other thing that was bothering me about the whole thing was simple and obvious: peer pressure. I’d basically just witnessed a young woman be coerced by a crowd to ‘get her tits out’ for their amusement and approval. And also a free bucket, of course, so it’s not as if she wasn’t compensated. But still. It irked me. Now, maybe she didn’t really care, and maybe her litany of refusals was only half-serious or for show only. But there was still that unmistakable element of bravado and dickishness and ‘EYYY!!!!’ that so often accompanies large groups and drinking.

Perhaps I’m just stubborn, but I really dislike being told what to do, especially if I don’t agree with it. I always have. It’s why I’ve never made the effort to learn to pray, despite my mum’s continued hand-wringing and guilt-tripping and exhortations, because I basically don’t want to be a hypocrite, and I don’t believe in doing things you don’t want to do or believe is right just to gain other people’s approval. But, you know, I’m not Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or anything, so that’s not to say I’ve never fallen foul or bowed to societal pressure. Otherwise I would never have agreed to get braces when I was 16, or shave my legs, and my overgrown mouth and leg hair would now be the stuff of legend – and I myself would probably be leading the life of a social outcast in a cave somewhere.

Anyway. My point being that my tolerance to peer pressure is quite low, especially where alcohol is concerned. I like to have a drink, or two, or three, but I like to do it on my own terms. Some people may consider this lame, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

So the next ‘game’ did nothing to pacify my feelings of disgruntled annoyance. “OK,” said the MC, “this next game is called the Whiskey Train. We need two lines up here at the front.”

I wasn’t sure of the exact rules of the Whiskey Train but I guessed it had something to do with pouring shots of whiskey in your mouth and racing to see which line got to the end first. If it were shots of Sambuca I might have been game, but this Lao-Lao whiskey that everyone uses in Vang Vieng is lethal – it’s cheap, unregulated, illegal and has a whopping 30-50% alcohol content. And as I’ve already mentioned, it tastes foul. But it sure is a quick way to get pissed.

Seeing that not everyone in the bar was up for joining the Whiskey Train, the MC said exasperatedly, “Right, guys, we’ve got some buckets of water here, and I give full permission to the winning team to come and soak  - every - one - of you - up there - in the bar - who doesn’t take part.” He made no attempt to hide his disdain.

“Pfft,” I replied, unimpressed, making no attempt to hide mine. Tom and I downed our BeerLao’s, watched the Whiskey Train from a safe distance and then made a swift exit. Time to move on.

Mojito Bar – ziplines, reporters and whiplash

After bar-hopping between a couple of the much quieter establishments on the Q-Bar side of the river, we ended up on the other side at a place called Mojito Bar. Tom queued up for some chips and mayo whilst the kindly Lao bar lady convinced me to drink a free shot. I didn’t know what it was, probably more home-brewed Lao-Lao whiskey, but it tasted like paint-stripper and seriously burned on the way down. The bar lady smiled at me approvingly, so I smiled back.

“Did you just drink the millipede whiskey?” Tom asked, chips in hand. My eyebrows raised in surprise.

“What?” I said, quickly wiping the last droplets from my mouth.

“Yeah, I saw one of the bottles they have behind the bar and it has a giant millipede in it.”

Fantastic. I had just imbibed essence of millipede - millipede wine, or whiskey, or whatever. Oh well, too late now! I tried to forget about it and focused on the chips in front of me instead.

Below us, on the wooden decks, the crowd undulated to the beats. To our right we could hear an elongated “wheee” and then a splash. It was one of the infamous ziplines. Something else I didn’t think I’d be partaking in today.  We looked on apprehensively. It was a popular attraction and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. All the zipliners we saw seemed to emerge safe and sound from the river, dripping and exhilarated but still alive. But as we cast our eyes to the left of the tower, we spotted a cardboard sign attached to the wooden waterfront fence. It said: “DO NOT JUMP HERE. YOU WILL DIE.”

I shuddered involuntarily. Had someone died here? Recently? Were we all dancing and drinking on the very spot some poor sod took their last gulp of Lao-Lao whiskey before leaping to their death?

It seems we weren’t the only ones asking questions. There was a man in the crowd sporting a very nifty, expensive looking D-SLR with a serious-business, big ass lens. We found out from some of our drinking companions that he was accompanying a female Australian journalist who was working on a piece for a magazine back home on the dangers of Vang Vieng and the recent unfortunate, fatal accidents that had taken place there.

I thought that she would have plenty of footage and material to observe and digest.

The next song, however, put these sobering thoughts on hold. I recognised it immediately, and so did a lot of the punters. We all took our positions on the dancefloor, falling quickly into formation in three sets of lines, and began dancing, to this:

This was not the first time I had seen the “Vang Vieng dance” – a Dutch girl back in Siem Reap had educated me on both the Vang Vieng dance and the Ko Pha Ngan dance, which were similar but with a few important variations – but this was the first time I got to dance to it.

It was silly, exhausting, and yes, very fun, and was followed up by The Village People’s “YMCA”. Cue more arm flailing, hip thrusting and good-natured jumping up and down.

By this point I was extremely sweaty and wandered off in search of the loo. Up on the road were several picnic tables and benches. I sat down to take a breather. Up here you had a good vantage point to take in all of Mojito bar and the river beyond. One person fell over. A brunette in a skimpy bikini with marker pen all up her arm fell into the arms of a muscley blonde Adonis and they proceeded to eat each other’s faces. There was nothing graceful about their little dance. Others necked shots and then staggered up the zipline tower. I winced. Just as before at Limbo bar, I didn’t want to look yet I couldn't look away.

To my right I noticed there was a young Lao woman and three small children, possibly her brothers and sisters, or her own. They sat down at the table, and watched. I watched them watching, feeling that sinking feeling from earlier. This was hardly an idyllic little picnic spot. Instead, I suddenly felt like we were visitors at the zoo and it was feeding time. A small part of me was overcome by the urge to apologise to them. Again, I thought to myself, what must they be thinking?

I had the same conflicted, twisty feeling when there was a repeat rendition of the Vang Vieng/YMCA combo dance half an hour later, and two little Lao girls, under the watchful but largely unperturbed eyes of their mothers, joined in at the back. Just a bit of harmless fun, or insidious, moral corrosion? I couldn't decide. Either way it didn’t feel right, them being there. But then why shouldn’t they? They lived here, didn’t they?

I soon felt tired of questioning the morality of everything, so I downed another bucket and made my way back down to the dancefloor, succumbing to that age-old reasoning: Thinking, bad. Alcohol, gooood. Plus they were playing LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” and no amount of moral quandary was ever going to stop me from dancing to that.

I think, on the whole, I would’ve enjoyed the Vang Vieng party scene a lot more if the music were more to my taste. I find it quite hard to get down to the rhythms of dubstep – there’s just too much disjointed whirring, beeping and electronic whining. It’s the sort of music you convulse to, like a slug in a jug of beer, not dance to. But this was great. Finally a run of songs I could really throw myself into! I shuffled, and then moshed to Pendulum’s “Voodoo People” and then, as if in response to my earlier disgruntlement, shouted out the lyrics to Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name”.

“FUCK YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!!!” I screamed, to no-one in particular. But it felt good. This was the point I gave myself minor whiplash, but it was totally worth it.

The sky began to darken and the final song of the evening came on, Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain.” It seemed a slightly strange choice but oddly fitting. I, and others, belted out the chorus as we made our way sluggishly up the stairs towards the armada of awaiting tuk tuks. It was only 6pm but the party was almost over. Here, anyway. In town I knew it would continue until early into the next morning. As it would the following day. And the day after that. And the day after that. At some point the river might claim a new life, a new sacrifice, but still the party would continue.

However, like any playground roundabout, there comes a point when you just get a bit too dizzy and you have to get off. Some people come to Vang Vieng intending to stop off for only a couple of days and then end up staying two weeks. We’d intended to stay for one night and ended up staying for four. But after four nights in Vang Vieng, we decided we’d seen enough, and that it was time to get off the roundabout.