My suspicions have been confirmed. The hot chocolate I had for breakfast in Luang Prabang was indeed coffee after all. Laos coffee. It’s alright I suppose. But the chocolatey notes were very disagreeable with my cheese and tomato omelette this morning. How I miss lattes.
It can’t have been much more than an hour later when my cup of Laos coffee was replaced with a bottle of beerlao. I was packed into the back of a tuk-tuk for the umpteenth time, the Romans beside me. Just over a week since our antics in Pai, the skill-full art of floating drunk down a river called to us yet again. In the morning brightness the mountains surrounding the town were visible in all their might, confirming my first impression that Vang Vieng is deep in the middle of nowhere. We were all very prepared with our swimming trunks and bottles of beerlao. Well, we thought ourselves prepared until we realised we had no bottle openers.
After a fellow passenger saved us from having to enter the river without a drop of alcohol, we stepped onto the stony bank of what must have been either a tributary or a distributary of the Mekong River. Or hell, perhaps even the Mekong itself. The sun blazed in the sky and I was suddenly struck by the smell of my armpits.
I lowered myself extra-carefully into the rubber ring. The river had a roguish feel to it. The water’s cold hands seized me and swept me away from the bank, its coldness briefly paralysing me – a brutal contrast to the ever-burning sun. The river was wider and deeper than that of Pai. It was darker and its water held an alluring animosity. 27 deaths in 1 month. I thought to myself. It was a long time ago, and by all accounts the experience has been trimmed and tamed down since then. Still…
If tubing in Pai was a Saturday morning cartoon, then tubing in Vang Vieng was a West End Show. I dipped my hand into the darkness and made powerful circles with my hands, creating a whirlpool which sent my ring spinning round and around like a fun-fayre ride. I took great gulps of beer as the sun burned my arms. I flipped onto my front, paddling and driving my ring forwards, embracing the coldness of the water as relief from the fire of the sky. Verdant green vegetation exploded along the bank and hazy blue mountainsides stood majestically in the distance.
There was a child in the water. A local child. He came out of nowhere and began to drag my ring towards the bank. I wondered what the hell he was doing, but then I saw the bar, the crowd of people milling about – half dancing – upon a wooden stage. Almost the exact moment I pressed my foot upon the bank did “everybody dance now” erupt from a pair of nearby speakers.
We all got out and sat on benches upon the bank where Tiberius, Caligula and I threw statements at each other. Statements about ourselves. The other two of us would have to guess whether one’s statement was true or false. If we guessed wrongly, we drank. If we guessed right, the Roman in question was forced to drink. While it started as a drinking game (and a pretty excellent one at that), it soon morphed into straight-up boasting, with all three of us trying do out-do each other, revealing outrageous and not so outrageous secrets. The boasting was showing no signs of slowing down, and probably would have continued until we were all sitting there in the dark was it not for an Israeli guy who plonked himself down right next to us and started talking about his time in India.
I do wish I could remember a single thing he said… There seems to be many people coming from India. But nobody going TO India…
We drank up, and after using the toilets provided – which take the cake (or the piss) for being the foulest fucking things I’ve ever seen (there was streams of piss running out of the doorway – we got back in the water.
At our second stop upon the river, Tiberius announced he was sick of beer. I certainly wasn’t sick of beer, but it was quickly decided that what we needed was to suck sweet carbonated poison out of a basin. More commonly referred to as a fish bowl. So out came the straws and the deceptive fizzy juice, and soon we were chatting away to a guy from Leicester amongst a bunch of other backpackers… The group has survived, I thought to myself. And I’m not referring to the river. Just a matter of days ago we had been in the midst of disaster. Now three of us were back together, facing outwards to the world and ready to take-on whatever it threw at us. A huge sense of optimism surged within me as can so often happen when one is possessed by alcohol.
We clustered around a smoky fire, its fumes outdoing the poignancy of the sun. So fantastically hot was the fire and the air around it, that when we slipped back into the river the water was colder and more uninviting than ever. I paddled tipsily along with whatever protection my ring afforded me.
People left their rings to swim through and under the water. I also left my ring – though only to swim after my can of beer which was rapidly floating away. The sun sank. The air became colder and the water darker. Flames leapt on the rocky shores and banks. We fast-tailed it out of the water towards them. The sun was gone and we all craved warmth.
Past the roaring fire on that stony bank, and the cold water that I swear would have frozen me to death had I stayed in it any longer, my memory becomes as hazy as the setting sun. However, while I do not remember much, it does not mean there is not much to tell…
