Spring Break 2009

It seems as though every time Ana and I land in a new place, we are completely bewildered as to how we got there and where we're actually supposed to be. After crossing the Laos border, obtaining our Laos visas, and dropping off our passports at the Thai embassy for a Thai visa extension, we tuk-tukked our way to the public bus station. We eventually figured out that we could just get on any bus with a sign that said it was heading to Vang Vieng, so that's what we did. And 3 hours later, the bus dropped us off on the side of a road and apparently we were at our destination.



Remember in college when people would go to Tijuana or somewhere equally as crazy during Spring break? That's what Vang Vieng is like. People pretty much just go there to party and have a good time. The town is full of tourists, mostly Europeans and some Australians, from what we could tell. We were sure that they all thought we were locals in an escape from tending our shops because we were two of the very few people of color that were in town just hanging out. After we followed our new American friends into town, we settled into a guesthouse that charged about $6 per night, walked around town a bit, had dinner, and then got a good night's rest before the main event.

Type "Vang Vieng" into any search engine and it will pull up pictures and articles about drunken tubing adventures in the river. That's pretty much what the town is built around, and we just had to partake in the activity while we were in the area. Admittedly, Ana and I were quite excited for our first adventure out of Nong Khai, but we had no idea what we were in for!

We rented our Cheerio tubes and got onto a tuk-tuk full of anxious river ragers. We were dropped off at the first bar and greeted with shots of Tiger whiskey being poured into our mouths. The guides showed us the different bars that lined the river that we would be floating down, and told us that no one makes it back by 6:00pm (which is the time that you have to return your tube in order to get your full deposit back) because everyone loses track of time. From where we were standing, a few feet away from where the tuk-tuk dropped us off, we could already see people zip-lining and swinging off of trees and into the river. We bought ourselves a bucket full of some alcoholic concotion to prep us for the day.

We floated from bar to bar, stopping to spend some time at each one to take a free shot, eat a free banana, zip-line into the river, listen to techno music, and mingle with our fellow tourists. We made so many friends!

All right, all right... you got me... I don't remember any of those people's names or anything about them. Except for the last guy. We recognized him because we saw him in a deep slumber at the lounge we were at the night before. He would not wake up, despite the waiter's attempts, and probably awoke in a chair the next day.

One of the stops was at this bar that had a mud pit. I'm writing about this mostly so I can post embarassing pictures of Ana, because she had way too much fun playing mud volleyball.

And then the sun started to go down and the party was almost over...

I believe we left the last bar a little after 5:00 hoping to still make it to return our tubes in time to get our full deposits back. We were told that we had to float down the river for about 50 minutes to get back into town. But we had no sense of time or direction. And we were still buzzed. It started to get dark, and also started raining. So I found myself floating down a river in a foreign country, in the rain and darkness, with my left foot hooked under Ana's tube in an attempt to keep us together.

On this dark and arduous journey to land, we climbed out of the river a total of 3 times before we actually made it back to where we were supposed to be. The first time, we were "saved" by some random local boy. We don't even know where he came from! But somehow he latched both of our tubes and swam us across the river and onto the bank before he started demanding us to give him money. Ana was not about to give him the 500 baht that she had in her waterproof pouch. (1) We didn't ask for your help and we don't know where you came from. (2) You don't have change for 500 baht. He threw Ana's tube into the river, visibly upset that he wasn't making any cash on this deal. I jumped into the river to save the tube and we continued to float on. Why we didn't just get off at that point, I'm not really sure...

The second time, we climbed onto the river bank at a place where we saw lots of lights, thinking we were in town. The only problem was that we had climbed off onto an area where there were a bunch of restaurants overlooking the river, so we were basically underneath a deck in the backyard of some restaurant that had barbed wire fencing. We had no choice but to keep on floating...

By this time, I figure we had been floating in the dark for over 50 minutes and there was no one around us... We floated under a bridge, and someone fishing on the bridge shouted out, "End of the road!" So we climbed out again, crossed the bridge, and were told by the fisherman that we were about 1 kilometer from the town we were supposed to be in. It would have been a long and cold and dark walk back. And by this time, Ana had also lost one of her slippers to the river.

Luckily, we spotted a tour group minivan close by. I ran up to the van as Ana hobbled behind me with one slipper, and knocked on the window, brokenly communicating that we needed a ride back into the town. There was space for us and the driver even took our tubes and put them in the trunk. We were saved by a group of Thai tourists! They were all stifling their laughter at the 2 girls in their swimsuits who crawled out of the river and ran from the middle of the darkness carrying inner tubes to their vehicle in hopes to hitch a ride to the town they floated past. But we really didn't care at this point. We were so thankful...

I'm not sure what time it was when we actually returned our tubes, but it was definitely after 6:00 and we had to pay extra because Ana lost her life jacket somehow. We were kind of upset about that, but looking back, we realize that things could have been a lot worse, and are definitely grateful that we somehow made it out all right.

At the end of the day, all we knew was that we were not in college anymore and we could no longer put up with this Spring Break lifestyle.