Tubing in Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng is known as Laos' tubing capital. So what did we do?! The first morning we went to the rental plce for the tubes, jumped on a tuk-tuk with 13 tubes and 13 people plus the driver (amazing, just have to see it, full is really full here in South East Asia :). To clarify: morning is 1p.m. because most poeple start that time and we were just tired in the real morning. Also, we enjoyed a long breakfast in our most favorite cafe/restaurant/guesthouse which we named: The FRIENDSbar. Why? Because from 8a.m. to 11p.m. they showed the comedy show FRIENDS and in the end I started to like it. We ate there pretty much every time chilling in a half-lying position in front of two TVs and nice food. Hey Nadja: you and Sandra would have definitaley enjoyed this place :-) Anyway, we were dropped of the tuk-tuk at the starting place for the tubing, the sun shining and the river at a slow speed. Just after 100 meter the first bar with a zipper invited all the tubers for a drink because if you wanted to use the zipper you had to buy a beer. Actually they also offered Pepsi, which for some unexplainable reason was sold out *g* After doing the zipper a couple of times, droppping you in the middle of the river, we continued to the second bar only 50 meters further (we thought we would never made it to the end) and again had to consume in order to use a swing of some 3 meter hights. Uli tried some backflips succesfully while I just had the feeling to drop safely from the moment you let of the swing until your body touches the water. And yes, it was a good exercise because the next swing started at some 9 meters hights forcing you to let go at some 6 or 7 meters hights. It was so much fun that we jumped over and over again being a challenge every time. After the third bar we floated down the river for another 50 minutes enjoying the sunset. We had so much fun that we decided to stay longer in Vang Vieng and do it again the next day. It was much fun again, this time with rain but more fun people and a 60-year-old lady doing everything we did, amazing and lots of fun to watch going down that big swing. The next day we started our longest journey to southern Laos, the 4000 Islands in the Mekong River. We started at 10 a.m. in Vang Vieng and had 4 hours ride to Vientiane where we spent the day to visit the major sights. Vientiane has nothing much to offer so the afternoon was enough time to explore the city (which was confirmed by an Australian goverment official we later met at a traffic light. Later that night we took the nightbus to Pakse and celebrated Uli's very good graded diploma thesis (got to his grade this day). After only 2 kilometers we had a flat tire but Lao poeple are good in repairing and fixed it very fast. After changing the mode of transport twice to another bus and a ferry we arrived on Don Det where we spent the next three nights.