[Laos] Chapter XXXVII: In which it is shown that we gained nothing much by our visit to Vang Vieng

Throughout our tour of Vietnam we were careful to avoid places that we believed to be over-commercialised and over-touristy, with a fair amount of success. Once we crossed the border to Laos, with its more relaxed atmosphere, we let our guards down.

And bang! We found ourselves trapped in the biggest tourist trap yet!

Vang Vieng is a small town where the number of tourists (at least at its centre) probably exceeds the number of locals, especially so on the weekend we spent there, which was a long holiday weekend for Laotians too (Lao National Day), adding thousands of Lao tourists to the thousands of foreign ones already there. Around the town centre virtually every house is a hotel or a restaurant or a tour agency or a pub or a massage parlour, or all of them combined. Restaurants seem to compete among themselves who will have a more attractive Western menu, from pizzas to burgers to schnitzels to hummus, alongside the Laotian and Thai staples (many of the restaurants --- for some obscure reason --- also play episodes of "Friends" non-stop on wide LCD screens). Major and minor streets are lined with rows of food stalls, all with identical menus --- burgers, sandwiches, pancakes, shakes --- all menus only in English, or rarely in Chinese or Korean --- never once in Lao. Come night --- when it's cooler than the torrid midday swelter --- the streets, restaurants and bars fill with tourists --- some in bathing suits, despite the clear requests by locals to dress modestly --- and the pubs and hostels begin to play American rock and pop music at full volume. But the main attraction of the town is the wide range of activities it offers --- all activities available from all tour agencies with very little variation in price --- tubing (floating down the river in a tractor's inner tube), kayaking (along the same river), boat tours (ditto), hot-air balloon rides (sunrise or sunset), rock climbing for all levels, zip-line adventures, and a variety of organised hikes, tours and drives to nearby crowded lagoons (bearing the inviting names of blue 1, blue 2, and blue 3), waterfalls and caves.

It is safe to say that we were not charmed by Vang Vieng and thought about leaving after one night there. So why did we end up staying four nights? Because we figured that a place that offers so little incentive for us to leave our hotel room for anything but meals would be a good place to pause, rethink which places we wanted to visit in Laos and which not --- probably shortening our overall stay there significantly --- and catch up on postponed chores.

We did, however, take part in one low-key (i.e. relatively expensive, US$86 per person) activity: a sunrise hot-air balloon ride over the town and the river. The scenery was quite beautiful (though not as beautiful as the rave reviews we had read), and the experience quite absorbing (as we had never gone by balloon before), but the pilot's tendency to bump the basket into the top of trees (either for laughs or for some more troublesome reason, we never found out) and the nonchalance with which the ground crew broke branches and trampled bushes at the improvised landing spot, did not convey much appreciation for the landscape we were travelling through.

Accommodations:
- Domon Guesthouse (1 night; ok, but available only for one night)
- Seng Aloun Guesthouse (3 nights; internet was pretty poor, but it took us hours to find a guesthouse which wasn't already full, so we grabbed it)

Photo captions: (a-j) sunrise hot-air balloon ride over Vang Vieng