More Soap Box Dribble

We might have been able to appreciate Vientiene if we hadn't been in such a bad mood. Instead, we slept late in our dingy hostel and spent several hours inside an air conditioned Internet cafe drinking Beer Laos- a local beer that was purchased in recent years by a Belgian brewery with the intention to reformulate it before they realized it kept winning in blind taste tests. Like most Asian beers we tested, your first one is delicious but by the third time you try it, you never want to drink it ever again.

We hemmed and hawed over where to go next. The destination in question was Vang Vieng- a town our guidebook described as once charming and eclectic but now completely soulless.
It made me sad to think of visiting a town that had prospered because of indulging the tastes of the backpacker crowd but completely lost its identity in the process. It was once an almost secret destination with an obscure and appealing beauty but now it caters to the post-high school or university-grad European travelling on Mum and Dad's pound and Euro with its "Happy" Shakes, opium slum-dens, "Friends" bars (that loop all nine or ten seasons of the TV show), "Funny" Brownies, and shrooms.
It was, however, the half-way point between Vientiene and the place I really wanted to be- Luang Prabang. It also famously touted among the backpacker scene one of Kady's favorite activities- one I've purposely avoided my entire life- River Tubing. So to avoid another twelve hour bus-ride, we purchased bus tickets to Luang Prabang with a twenty hour stop-over in Vang Vieng.

Our second and last night in Vientiene, I was feeling stubborn and didn't want to pay twelve dollars for the three-bed hostel we had shared with the now-departed Helga so I insisted on wandering the streets trying to find a better or cheaper room.

Kady had given up, but I exclaimed, "I just want something good to happen to us!"
Exiting a too-expensive hotel we inquired about, a woman called out to us, "Are you looking for a room?" and after some gentle haggling, we had one of the nicest rooms of our entire journey for some $16.

We slept like babies and were on the bus listening to bloated British boys brag about drug overdoses on their parents' dime by eleven the next morning. We arrived in Vang Vieng somewhere between two and four pm and I once again stubbornly wandered around looking for a room. We settled on one that was about four dollars. Just because, I tried to haggle it down a little.

We ate lunch and headed to the river where we attempted to appreciate our G-rated version of the whole scene. It was late in the day and we refused to pay for a tube so we just asked to borrow these British peoples' tubes to float about fifty feet down the river which sated Kady's craving until she can get to Apple River. We hitched a tuktuk back to the center of town. Kady got in an argument about the dangers of being sixty years old and solo-cycling India and I hated all of these people for ruining this town and the town for succumbing.

When we returned to our room to shower, we discovered the largest cockroach of our entire trip in our bathroom. I would wake in the middle of the night to find it trying to sneak from the bathroom into our sleeping quarters and murder it while sobbing.
We walked around town weaving in and out of Brits dressed horribly inappropriately in tiny swim suits for DINNER no doubt coming off of miscellaneous drug cocktails. We were handed a flyer for a "free whiskey bucket", which we of course had to investigate. "What's the catch?" we asked. The catch was that it tasted like lighter fluid bubble gum. On the way out of the bar we spent a total of five minutes at- long enough to get our free bucket and depart- we realized there were young British girls working there. Upon questioning them, we learned they worked there for free food, booze and discounted lodge. We still couldn't figure out how anyone was making money at such an operation but the talkative girl said she was working there until things got better in Bangkok. I asked what the latest was to which she replied, "Oh, things are much worse. The airport is shut down and they blew up all the embassies!" None of this was even remotely close to the reality of anything that had happened but she seemed, by the wideness in her eyes, to believe this with near-religious fervor. Kady and I wondered if she was milking the tepid-at-worst waters of Bangkok's political unrest to keep the parents padding her account.

That next morning as we left this now culture-less black hole of a town, I caught a glimpse of what had brought people there in the first place.

We had eight hours on the bus before arriving in Luang Prabang.