Vang Vieng’s infamous tubing bars are closed, but it’s still worth visiting.
Tubing isn’t just about getting hammered on Lao Lao.
Vang Vieng used to be infamous for ‘tubing’ — the experience of floating down the town’s slow-moving Nam Song river in tyre inner tubes. Until recently it was a magnet for young, party-focused Australian and British tourists who came for the loose bars along the river, which would throw ropes out to groups of floating tourists, tow them in, and offer copious buckets of beer, Lao Lao cocktails, and ‘happy’ and ‘magic’ menu items. Tubing became infamous after several tourists died (reports say up to 14 died in 2011 alone), falling from bars into the river drunk or drowning after too many drinks.
I’d heard of it, and being fairly risk averse, and not a massive partier or a huge fan of crowds of drunk Aussies I’d pretty much decided to steer clear of Vang Vieng altogether.
However, it’s a logical stop on the way from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, and needing to break up our 12 hour+ bus trip between the two, we decided to stop there and take a look.
What we found there was slightly eerie. It’s not quite a ghost town in rainy season, but it’s close. In the town area, there are streets upon streets of mostly empty reggae bars, Aussie bars, and massive restaurants playing reruns of Family Guy and Friends on booming TVs to rooms full of low tables and cushions, but mostly void of customers.
Most of the riverside bars (in fact, all but one) have been closed down by the Laos government after the deaths and bad press.
After deciding on a cheapish hotel whose construction appeared to have been halted at about the midway point (stairwells leading to nonexistent floors, boarded-off upper hallways), we stole a night’s sleep in a room with a tiny balcony which past the decaying roofs overlooked a stunning vista. On the edge of town, the wide river winds sleepily between stunning limestone karsts: surreal, tall rocky outcroppings that jut suddenly out of flat earth.
In the morning we ate what seems to be the tourist breakfast du jour in Vang Vieng — hyper-westernised versions of Laos street food rolls, with any and all combination of fried meats, eggs, cheese and salad. A remnant of French colonial history, baguettes and bread are as big a part of Laos food as Vietnamese. Like the restaurants and bars, the stark difference between the vast number of street food stalls and the dwindling number of customers speaks to the decline of the town as a tourist destination. Stall holders almost beg you for your custom, and when there’s 6 or 8 identical sellers within eye sight, they need to be charming to make a sale.
Despite my reservations, we decided to give tubing a go. Not knowing the circumstances of the deaths but having heard about them nonetheless, I’d imagined tubing to be something like drunken solo white water rafting, possibly with crocodiles or leeches thrown in the mix.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The inner tubes are hired from a business in the town, who then bus a group of you upstream in a tuk tuk ute. The group in our tuk tuk consisted of myself, my partner, and a southern Chinese family of two teenage children, their parents and an older aunt.
The river is very slow and relaxed. It’s not a hair-raising ride, even in rainy season, when rivers all across Southeast Asia are swollen and faster. I believe it would have been possible to actually ride the river the whole way down without even getting wet, if thats what you wanted.
My only conclusion is that the only way people could die doing this is that in any country, drinking and swimming probably shouldn’t mix.
Almost as soon as we splashed our way into the narrow part of the river that was moving quickly enough to get our tubes moving downstream, we were hooked in by workers from the first bar along the river. It’s a chilled out jungly kind of spot, with a DJ, tourists in bikinis and board shorts, a volleyball net and drop toilets. We chugged a couple of cheap cocktails and then, expecting more bars to be coming along soon, hopped back in the river.
The float down the river is a stunning experience. Travel without the intrusion of a noisy motor or the isolating windows and walls of a bus is a rare and beautiful experience. From your utterly relaxed vantage point in the river it’s possible to see and hear birds nesting on the karsts, feel the temperature of the water and the air and see the wide sky above you. As we meandered down the river, hands trailing in the water, the sun set slowly above us, washing the sky in pink and peach, the thin clouds vibrant with colour turning the rocky karsts into toothy silhouettes.
As we floated further and further downstream, kayaking groups and slow-moving tourist boats passing us by, we began to realise that there may not be any more riverside bars. We stopped at one or two and found literally nobody there. We saw a few gutted out spots with what looked like the remnants of tyre swings, but other than that it was peaceful.
Just as we started to worry that we’d miss the end point of the tubing ride in the rapidly waning daylight, we skidded up onto a shallow sandy part of the river. It appears the town is built around a shallow area of the river, and it’s impossible to float past it. I admit I had visions of floating obliviously past the town in the dark, missing the exit and plummeting down a waterfall in the depths of night, but the river shallows to a depth of perhaps 30 centimetres close to the town, and you’ll find that your tube will run aground naturally.
As we scrambled barefoot up the banks and trudged back to our hotel, returning our inner tubes just in time to avoid a fine along the way and stopping to glance idly at souvenir shops selling Tubing branded board shorts and waterproof bags, I was glad I decided to try it.
In terms of stark karst-dominated landscapes, Cat Tien national park in Vietnam wins over Vang Vieng and Ha Long Bay hands down. Still, it’s a convenient rest stop between Vientiane and Luang Prabang, tubing is nice, and those breakfast rolls are pretty awesome.