Being A Kid Again in the Mountains and Rivers of Laos

Kayaking, tubing, swimming in the water hole. Once a place to get high and watch TV, now Vang Vieng is a place to relive childhood memories.

We were sitting outside at the cafe alongside the Nam Song River in Vang Vieng, Laos, and watching as tourists drifted by on kayaks and local kids splashed each other and tried to skip rocks. The shallow water only came up to their waists and lower stomachs.

"Did you ever play in the river when you were growing up?" I asked my Laotian companion, Na. "Back when I was growing up in Tennessee, we used to play in the creek at summer camp, we would make boats out of wood and send them down the rapids. There were these animals with claws in the creek, called crawdads, like small lobsters. We tried to catch them." 

She responded with memories of her own. 

I was the fifth of seven children. I grew up in a village along the Mekong River near Vientiane. My dad worked on the island and tended to the garden. Sometimes he would take me and my brother along. We would ride on the back of the bike while he pedaled. We would stop at the market first. Then we would keep going towards the islands. We would get on a boat. When we got close, my brother and I would jump off and run across the sand to the island. The sand bar starts before the island...

Sometimes my dad couldn't bring me. Then I'd stay home and play games with my brothers and sisters.

"What kind of games did you play?"

All kinds. We played one game where you flick your finger forward and try to hit a small ball. We would push a wheel with a stick and try to keep it going. Sometimes we would set up a can and take off our flip flops and throw them at the can.

"In America, we play that game with guns! When we go camping, set up our empty beer cans on a tree stump or somewhere and shoot at them."

Sounds fun.

***

I'd arrived in Vang Vieng two days before. I could not see the mountains because of the haze. (Farmers in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia practice shifting cultivation, which involves burning the fields in the spring to clear them.) The next day, the haze cleared, and the view of karst limestone mountains on the other side of the river spread out from my guesthouse balcony.

A decade and a half ago, backpackers came here just to lie down and stare at TVs displaying Peter Griffin and Chandler Bing all day. As an old blog, VangVieng.org described the place in 2010:

Originally opened up by hedonistic backpackers, the city’s predominant ambiance is one of lethargy by day and debauchery by night: tourists sprawl out in the pillow-filled restaurants, termed “TV Bars,” watching re-runs of Friends and Family Guy episodes until the sun goes down, and then party heavily until the early hours. Nevertheless, there is a growing number of more sedate foreign sightseers.

The river was lined with bars accessible mainly by inner tube.

Many beer and other pit stops along the way. Also, try the diving stop and the swing. Some dry bags may not be of the best quality, often digital cameras get ruined by faulty dry bags rented to tourists, so beware and if in doubt, don’t bring your camera. ... The party scene has taken over and the owners use humongous loudspeakers, effectively blocking out any singing of birds. Beware of tubes getting stolen while stopping at bars, you may lose your deposit and the ride down. Tubes get stacked up at each bar so keep an eye on how many are left, especially at the first few bars where lots of people arrive without their own tube. 

Eventually, the reputation--and the injuries and deaths--became too much for the Laos government. After about two dozen drunken tourists were killed tubing in 2011, the authorities shut down many of the bars and implemented safety standards.

***

Na drove in from Vientiane on Saturday. She arrived in the afternoon, and we took her car to the Blue Lagoon 1. 

"Blue Lagoon 1 is a classic. It's been around forever," said the manager of the Full Moon Bar II. (It's across the street from the Full Moon Bar I. His mother started it, and he opened the expansion a couple of years ago.) "Blue Lagoon 2 must have opened about eight years ago."

Now there's about six blue lagoons in the countryside around Vang Vieng. Each has a swimming hole in the ground, rope swings, and platforms to jump off of. You can order beer and snacks and dangle your legs in the water or sit cross legged on a platform under a roof.

Blue Lagoon 1 is the closest, but it's also the smallest and most crowded. Blue Lagoon 2 is the second-closest and one of the largest, according to Google reviews. It must have some of the most picturesque scenery, too. It's right in front of a towering limestone peak.

We sat down on some rocks by the edge of the pool at Blue Lagoon 2, and Na ordered papaya salad, khai ping (Laos eggs), and Laobeer. I peeled the shell off an eggs, and a yellow hard-boiled egg with green onions baked into the top emerged.

"How do they do that?"

They crack a hole in the top and drain it and then refill it.

The egg yolk is mixed with chicken stock, soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, black pepper, garlic, and other seasonings. Then the eggs are cooked.

Khai ping need not be returned to its shell. It can be cooked in any container. But it’s often sold back in it own shell. Here it is being cooked in banana leafs. Photo courtesy of Chiang Mai University. Creative Commons 4.0.

"Ah roi!" It was a wonderful ball of MSG.

It's been too long since summer camp. I forgot how it looks from the top of a wooden platform overlooking a lake. But if you just walk to the ledge and step off, you don't even have to jump. The gravity takes over, and you are soon submerged with water up your nose.

***

Driving back on a dirt road from Blue Lagoon 2, we had to stop to let cows and chickens walk by. 

"Whose cows are they?" I asked. They seemed to just be roaming where ever they wanted. "Does somebody own them, or are they owned by the village?"

A family owns them. They can go where they want. They eat natural insects and plants. They know their way home. They taste better.

***

A large group of the kayaking tourists were from Korea. There are so many Koreans in Vang Vieng that most of the commercial signs display Korean text. Chinese also make up a large contingent of tourists. Of course there are still a lot of Europeans and Americans, but they don't make up such a large percentage of the total as they once did. 

Seeing the kids playing and the kayakers having fun, we decided to do it, too. You can book anything at just about any restaurant or hotel whose tables are covered with brochures and laminated promotions. Ride in a hot air balloons! Paraglide! Zipline! Drive a buggy! Do many of those things in a package tour filling a day!

They brought us to the drop off point in a songthaew with kayaks strapped to the roof. I brought two tall cans of beer along. (Why stop at riverside bars when the kayak can be its own floating bar?) The waterproof bags seemed to work better than the defective ones of the past (although, fortunately, I didn't have to test them).

The river in dry season is shallow and mostly calm. The current pulls you along at a meandering pace. You don't have to paddle much to move. You do have to paddle to steer. You have to avoid large rocks protruding out of the water at multiple points. And free yourself from the rocks covering the shallow river floor at other points. A couple of times we got stuck. And drunk people would jump into this rocky river? No wonder so many got hurt.

A bridge was ahead. A bumping bass mix. Lao singing. We were approaching a bar.

Plastic tables sat on wooden platforms on the edge of the river under tarps held up by bamboo. There appeared to be a lot of Lao families relaxing there. A couple of children played in tubes alongside the platforms. No farang (foreigners) playing beer pong. 

We could hear the birds chirping. We splashed each other with water. And we arrived back at the cafe where we started.