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Bring it on Vang Vieng!!!!

After four days of being totally chilled out in Luang Prabang, we took a 7 hour bus journey through the mountains to Vang Vieng. Where the town of Vang Vieng lacks the charm of Luang Prabang, it most certainly makes up for it in cheesy-ness. Still, we did have totally awesome pizzas for lunch one day (at a restaurant that implored us to "Give pizza a chance!", and we did watch about 20 minutes of a Friends rerun (for which we are deeply ashamed!!!!).

But set in some wild limestone karst mountains, it's a beautiful spot.

So, the most popular outdoorsy activity to do in Vang Vieng is to "tube" down the Nam Song river on an inflated tractor innertube. You can stop off at floating bars along the way. Being the (ahem...) young, hip travellers that we are we booked our tubing experience with Mr Keo, our guide. Unfortunately (or fortunately as it turned out), our tubing was actually through a mountain cave (very dark and a little scary) to check out stalagmites and stalactites, and came at the end of an excellent day's hike through the Lao countryside. In retrospect, we were much happier that didn't end up having to bob down the river with groups of drunk 20-year olds!