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The One Where We Went to Vang Vieng (+Photos)

Posted on July 30, 2007

Vang Vieng, Laos is apparently one of those places that divides travelers pretty evenly between those who love it and those who hate it. Known as Laos’s ‘chill-out town’, its main attractions seem to be abundant weed/shrooms & cheap pizza or breathtaking natural beauty & outdoor activity depending entirely on who you talk to or what guidebook you read. Lonely Planet’s scathing denouncement of the place dwells on the fact that every restaurant in town seems to have burned a pirated “Friends” DVD and has the same 6 episodes in constant rotation (Mark Elliot’s Graphic Traveler’s Guide to SE Asia also mentions the Friends phenomenon). The Rough Guide is a little kinder and stresses that despite the Friends thing, the scenery surrounding VV is some of the most gorgeous in all of SE Asia. So we were really in a quandary as to whether or not we should go. We changed our minds something like 4 times about it! But ultimately, since it was on the way to Vientiane (Laos’s capital city and somewhere we definitely had to go to get me more passport pages at the American embassy), we had to kill some weekend days, and because we’d heard they had really rad tubing down the river there, we decided to go.

Instead of falling into one camp or the other, we kind of fell into both. Vang Vieng is visually stunning with jagged limestone cliffs rising from the Nam Song river against a backdrop of Laos’s seemingly endless (esp. when you are traveling over them in a rattle-trap bus) mountains. The town also caters to budget travelers who are on the road for a long time. As a result there are perfectly nice & clean rooms with private baths, A/C, and an outdoor balcony overlooking the river for about $10 a night.

Many of the restaurants have little living-room like areas with pillows and futons on the ground around low tables facing a TV set. Instead of the reported Friends episodes, the entertainment on offer comes from an encyclopedic - and definitely pirated (Shrek the Third and Transformers were playing in a couple of places!) - collection of DVDs. Initially I felt myself scoffing at the people who were camped out around the TVs, but eventually Gregor and I found ourselves hunkered down with some beer Lao, a showing of “The Breakup”, and a tiny, tiny (female) kitten that G dubbed “Dave”. It felt like a reasonable facsimile of home for a couple of hours, although Dave was exponentially skinnier than Astrid. The experience showed me that it’s important to let yourself do something comfortable and familiar once in a while when you are on the road for a long time.

And then there was the tubing (discussed in detail in the next post). Having read all about it we were eager to do it, but didn’t expect to be introduced quite as swiftly as we were. A couple of hours after arriving in town, and settling down for a sunset dinner at the riverbank restaurant attached to our guest house, we spotted a flotilla of tubes several hundred meters up the river. Then we heard the singing, an off-key, Irish-accented warble of ‘Champagne Supernova.’ Sure enough, it was our boatmates from the slow boat a week earlier. By the time they floated by us they’d moved on to the Summer of ‘69, and we’d been treated to the perfect diorama of the Vang Vieng scene.

So that was the good, what about the bad? Well, it was just what all the negative reports said. Mostly the town is pretty faceless and anonymous. They have all this natural beauty and yet they’ve done little to accentuate it. The village faces toward a dusty highway and away from the river with the incredible view. Rather than using the naturally elegant traditional Lao style of architecture, the town seems to prefer the neo-neo-greek-revival-columns-make-a-place-look-classy school. And yes, after initially thinking the Friends phenomenon was in the past, we went by no less than five places in a row blaring Phoebe’s rendition of Smelly Cat. I also fell victim to some really really bad pizza. It was kind of depressing.

However the final verdict is that we are glad we went. Tubing truly made it all worthwhile and we found some other things in Vang Vieng that we didn’t even know we were looking for. If others were headed this way (and I hope we are convincing some of you to come to Laos!!!) I would definitely point them to Vang Vieng at least for a couple of days of outdoor fun and maybe a nostalgic showing of The One Where Joey Goes Commando.

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