Some photos from my weekend in Vang Vieng!
As much as Vang Vieng it definitely not experiencing “authentic Laos”, I always have a great time when I go there. However, one of my favorite things about it is “passively participating”; a term Alana and I came up with. This means participating to the extent that you can still mock everyone else around you for being stupider and drunker than you, which still enjoying the tubing and a Beerlao. I do have to say I saw some pretty horrific sights this last time I was there, the kind of things that make me actually feel bad for the Lao people who live there. I was walking down a street and I actually saw a young man, esentially in process of passing out, in the gutter, puking on himself, with one shoe on. He also had a really tacky mohawk and I had seen him earlier in the street shouting obscenities in English.
I also saw some guy so drunk they could hardly walk, stumbling up the street. This was slightly amusing to me in a comical way, but I wondered what kind of impression that left on Lao people. But I saw one Lao man watching them, and laughing really hard. “Mao lai lai!” he said (Really really drunk!). So, maybe it’s not that bad.
I also met this couple who had met 3 weeks earlier in Vang Vieng. The girl was English and the guy was Australian, and he was proudly, and drunkenly, showing off where she had branded her name into his lower abdominal area. “I never want another woman to touch my junk again!” he kept hollering.
As I sat, quietly sipping my Beerlao, an extremely drunk man appraoched me and said “Hi Darling”
“Do I know you?”
“No, but wait just a minute, I’m going to the toilet, I’ll be right back.”
I could hardly wait.
This man (Francis) then came back and insisted on drunkenly slobbering in my ear for the next 30 minutes about how he was African (even though he had white skin…) and about how his life philosophy was “PASSION! VISION! ACTION!”. Eventually something else distracted him and I managed to scurry off unnoticed.
Vang Vieng… what a strange place. But fun, nevertheless.