Amnesia

Chemistry in Action!
I don't know what I did today. The journal entry for this day is sparse on details of the itinerary. My mind was occupied by events back home that are too personal to go into here. All I wrote about the day itself is "Didn't go tubing today as I felt hungover and not especially sociable." Not very colourful is it--although you might be curious about tubing.

Tubing does involve a tube, but it's not got anything to with colonic irrigation. The tube in question is an inner tube--a huge tractor wheel of an inner tube--that you ride down a river in. I guess it can be fast and furious and involve whitewater rapids, but around Vang Vieng the waters move slowly and tubing is a leisure activity more similar to smoking a big fat reefer than anything else. First, if you don't feel like it you don't have to move. You can sit with your butt dipping into the mild waters and let the current take you downstream as it pleases. Second, every five hundred metres or so (the distance equivalent of the time it takes to roll and smoke a bifter) there is beer and refreshments available. These are served by locals from the banks of the river. Using elaborate hooked-poles they snare the tube and pull you in for not-very-chilled bottles of Beer Lao. A three or four hour ride can result in some very merry campers--kind of like a pub crawl for the pathologically lazy.

I have some regrets about not doing this iconic activity so representative of Laos, but having the right company in this kind venture is critical. If you get stuck with the wrong person it's like being cornered by the pub-bore with no easy means of escape (I mean, how fast can you paddle?). Since there wasn't anybody I'd really hit it off with in Vang Vieng the impulse to go tubing wasn't so strong.

Cool dudes or frontin' tosspots? And how does she put out her fag?
One of the other big draws of Vang Vieng, aside from the magic mushroom, is the incredible limestone geography of the area. Karst formations abound with limestone hills riven with caverns and tunnels that have been forged by the action of acid rain. It must make for some spectacular potholing. But maybe that's too energy intensive for a place like Vang Vieng...