Vang Vieng, Laos

Vang Vieng, Laos, Wednesday 29th December

Edie’s blog

I’ve been floating down the slipstream in the Nam Song river, I just saw a beautiful red dragonfly. The mountains are huge and beautiful, it’s boiling hot here.
This morning, I had a lovely mulberry shake at breakfast in a farm outside Vang Vieng.
Yesterday, I went cycling to a lagoon, 4 miles through little villages. There are little kids working for their Mums and Dads because it’s a very poor country.
I’m sad because there are lots of people that don’t have a lot of money.

I want to go and see what Will’s doing, he’s playing with the kids in the field behind us.
…“Oh my god, have you seen the herd of children that Will’s playing with.??!!”

Will’s blog
There are big mountains where I am now in Laos. I am having breakfast in a restaurant with a nice garden. There was a huge butterfly, we have seen loads of them all over the place. And there are lots of huge motorbikes around, they are gigantic. We are staying by the river called the Nam Song in Vang Vieng.  There are also lots of air balloons that wake me up in the morning.  They have big flames to keep the them up in the air.




Ollie’s blog


Sitting on the balcony of our hut overlooking the Nam Song river, huge limestone cliffs surround us, the water bubbling by. The boom from the sound system across the river can just be made out over the natural sounds which is a bit of a pain and can be a lot worse at night. Luckily they are only allowed to play music until 10pm…but one night it was Lao karaoke! Louis got a very powerful, green laser torch in Bangkok which can shine an amazing distance and we half-heartedly tormented the karaoke singers with it late at night !

Vang Vieng is a very strange place, nestled in an incredibly dramatic valley. Someone described it as Apocalypse Now meets Club Med which is not far off. A vast, golden hot air balloon has just drifted through the trees in front of me!…
This is where the westerners come to hang out and get beered up, drugged up and generally wasted!! You can tube (rubber ring ) down the fast flowing river or canoe or longboat or go caving. For very little money, they are thrown beers by the locals or honey drinks laced with magic mushrooms in buckets as they speed by. It is seriously strange, pretty sick…and seemingly out of control.

Meanwhile, the real Laos just about exists side by side, people fish by hand with large weighted nets and women stoop over the rushing river for hours to gather cockles.

Yesterday, we cycled out to “the blue lagoon” (more like a small pond) with a rope swing but among fiercely steep limestone cliffs that take your breath away…the roads are stony mud tracks and lethal. Life is very hot and hard in the fields. Amazingly, there seems on the surface very little resentment of these crazy foreigners, in fact we are greeted my wide smiles wherever we go…great to see the kids here, in uniform, sometimes 3 on one bike, all Will’s age, on their way to school.

For all its obvious faults and strange mixture of gob-smacking beauty and jaw-dropping
Western crassness , we have decided to stay here for a few days. The moment we arrived , after a hair-raising minibus ride thought the mountains from Vientiane, we picked up our bags and made our way over this gorgeous little wooden bridge ( I’ve never fallen in love with a bridge before!) to a  lovely ‘quiet’ home stay. All forms of life pass over that bridge, tractors loaded down with workers, 4X4 jeeps with Thai tourists, men in straw hats with pots and pans that could fill half a shop. It’s great to just sit and watch. This small holding has begun in some strange way to remind me of Hillside, you can get away from it all  here. There are trees all around and tropical ‘lawns’ for the kids to run around on and ducks, cows and calves, water buffalo and 10 small puppies suckled by their Mum in a deep sandy hole in the river bank. It is very calm and we have two huts side by side, 30 feet from the water’s edge.

This afternoon, our 4th day? (I’m losing count) Edie and Louis have been finding the deeper gulleys in the river to be swept down, Will and I were paddling in the shallower sections. It’s not heaven but it feels like a good place to stop and take our breath …We’ve been away nearly 4 weeks.