Sunday 29 May 2011

A town where I am embarressed to be Australian

We arrived in Vang Vieng this afternoon, though my computer doesn't believe it, my computer thinks we are still in Vientiane.

I would love to show you some photos, but the internet is a little slow, which makes it challenging. I am also having trouble seeing facebook and things that make life feel normal.

And life in Viang Veng is anything but normal. Here are a few things that people have said about this town:

The chilled-out town.

What a town would be like if it were run by 19 year olds.

Full of Australian girls in tiny bikinis.

Every cafe in Vang Vieng shows Family Guy or Friends.

It is all eerily true. And then the sun went down and all these scantily clad drunk people covered in paint appeared (many of them Australian). They had been tubing, the main tourist activity for the town. On the plus side, the wall to wall tourists mean there are plenty of those delicious banana pancakes around.

A hundred metres away is jungle and banana plantations and rural Laos. We are in a valley surrounded by those unlikely hills that shoot straight up out of the rice flats. Beautiful and crass all rolled together.

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