Tubing in the Vang Vieng/Rocket Day!

The view from our hotel in Vang Vieng. Despite the amazing view's our hotel was extremely shabby. Our room consisted of a towel rack, a tiny metal table and a king sized mattress on a fairly dirty floor. However, the hotel was cheap, in the heart of town, and fairly secure..... plus it had screens on the window, a huge luxury!

Vang Vieng is basically long L shaped roads with a bunch of other random streets scattered around. When we got to town we were greeted by a gravel parking lot(possibly a runway as well) that was aproximately 1000m long(maybe longer) by 250m wide, woo hoo! Our bus, after traveling the 5 hours from Luang Prabang drove through the gravel lot and towards the main road. It dropped us off at the "bus station" which is basically what every tour guide calls their office. We walked in to town with our bags on our back and searched for someplace cheap, not scalding hot, and near stuff. The town is basically a bunch of 19 and 20 year old European and Australian teenagers who somehow escaped from home and all gathered to party in some random Lao truckstop. The main attraction(and only attraction within the city) is inner tubing down the river. You basically pay 7 dollars for trip, including the tuk tuk ride 2 miles up the road. The Tuk Tuk drops you off, and there is a small stairway leading to the river, and then about 15 bars over the next 200m of the river, on both sides. All the bars have trapeze style rope swings, high jump platforms, and one even a waterslide. Each bar has a small dock, where the bartenders throw a rope with an empty plastic soda or water bottle on the end(which floats, a la a life preserver.) Every bar has a person throwing these "life preservers"at you, until you grab hold of one, while floating down the river, and they pull you in. From there, there is buckets(literally) of drinks as well as food, and other tasty treats. It is basically a million college kids going crazy on the edge of some poor Lao river. It seems as though every bar does their best to think up more dangerous ways to enter the water than the next!

Unfortunately, this year has been really dry, and the river is really low. Jin has been a little sick and on antibiotics, so she couldnt drink, and there was hardly anyone on the river that day anyways, so it was basically a few groups of friends hanging out at each bar. It was cool, but not the best excuse i've seen to party and my motivation to get crazy at 1pm on a wednesday in 100 degree heat isn't what it used to be. I was basically excited to just sit in a tube and float down the river and swim all day. However, because of the low water, the river was moving well below walking speed and after 4 hours of swimming and "tubing" we had only gone one mile. The point is to tube back to the center of town, pull out your tube and start partying more, but the river was moving soooo slow, and we were in danger of not making it back before dark, and the 6pm cutoff time to return our tubes by. Finally, Me and Jin pulled our tubes out of the river, baking in the sun, and got a tuk tuk to drive us back the 1 plus mile to the center of town. it was wayyy too hot and dirty outside to be walking through town, and our tubes might have exploded rolling on the concrete. The tar in the roads was seriously melting to our shoes as we walked, it was so hot!

One reason for the quiet day on the river, was that it was "Rocket Day!" I'd never heard of this holiday, but it certainly was fun! We first noticed something strange sitting down for breakfast and seeing trucks and tuk tuks driving through town with 20foot long colorful arrow like sticks angled from the back over the front carriage of the car. The flatbed part of each truck had maybe 10 or 20 people standing up, wearing super silly clothes, with pots and pans, faces painted, etc. At first I thought this is what the insanely crazy local bars did to drum up business in the quiet morning hours. Later, right after we paid for the tubes, we found out it was Rocket Day, and that all the bars on the river would be closed so the employees could party. The bars were open, though not all of them. The rockets, which basically resembled the model rockets young boys build, but between 5 and 25 feet long were insane.... Some more resembling actual missiles than a boy's toy. They went off from various locations throughout the day, reaching a crescendo around sunset. Some went a few hundred feet, some well over a couple thousand feet... It got hard to estimate. But I know they definitely went way higher than the ones i built and launched when I was 13 or so, which was around 1200 feet max. Some had white smoke, some black, it was definitely a sight to see.... My first Rocket Day!

P.S. Lao is home to some of the world's best traveller hippy tshirt/basketball jerseys. You can't go an hour in this country without seeing a 20 year old wearing the "tubing in the Vang Vieng" jersey.... So I had to steal it for our title! Sorry Lao T Shirt Makers!!!