Secret war, new years celebrations and tubing

saarisweg
Dec 2, 2014
2 min read

During my last post we were waiting a whole day for a bus, but fortunately it finally came! And took us to the hideous town of Samneua, with ugly concrete construction and really nothing interesting to do. Fast forward to the reason for our detour to the east: Vieng Xay. This lovely village is situated between beautiful rock formations and we had a guesthouse on stilts by the side of a small lake. Here we learned all about the secret war that took place in Laos, how for nine long years 2million USD worth of US bombs came down and that the whole thing is just denied. Huge caves with entire villages in it, including hospitals, cinemas and a political center. After this violent history lesson it was time for some fun: Phon Sa Van and a 3 days New Year celebration. We couldn't find a place to stay because of the parties but met nice Spaniards and slept one night in the hallway of the guesthouse were they stayed, and the next day the sweet owner Kong took us to the festivities: bullfights (but semi-friendly, if they didn't want to, everybody walked away), tennis ball catch in lines (apparently THE way to arrange a marriage) and a quite bizarre gambling scam. With a group he took us to some natural hot springs, spent an afternoon rolling in hot mud with beers right next to locals taking their daily baths and looked our eyes out on the mysterious plain-or-jars. On to Luang Prabang, the 'city' with the coolest market so far with delicious and very cheap food. Here were at least 30 temples, and the monks were singing and walking around in the morning with their kettles to collect alms. We mopedded to a waterfall to swim by and then walked up for an hour along the waterfall to a little lake/mangrove where we found an unguarded bamboo raft and could not resist the temptation to take it for a little ride. On to VangVieng because it was time to go tubing. We got to know a Swedish dude with a house and a room which we rented cheaply, and that was fine because all bungalo and guesthouses were crowded with party tourists in fluorescent-colored wifebeaters and matching sunglasses who ate hamburgers and watched re-runs of Friends on huge LCD screens. The tubing was especially nice because we were stoned and visited only the quiet bars along the waterfront which made for interesting conversations with the locals. We rode to an awesome lagoon with a huuuge cave where we 'got lost' in the dark for a while and then we swam between the crazy partying Koreans and climbed trees to jump from there into the wonderful blue water (an estimation mistake on my part resulted in a blue butt, stupid!). Today we crossed the border with Thailand and just realized that we actually have no idea what to do next. But we will probably think of something to keep us busy the last week :)