I’m not quite sure how to describe this place, I said in the tubing post that I was pleasantly surprised, after seeing some more of the town, I realise this was a major understatement!
We initially planned on staying 2 days in Vang Vieng, seeing it as a means of breaking up the journey to get up to Luang Prabang, we stayed 6 days and were still sad to leave. I can’t quite put my finger on what it was but we loved it, maybe it was because I had such low expectations. It has so much more to offer than tubing. We enjoyed hiking, biking, kayaking and caving and still we probably only touched the surface of what’s on offer.
Here’s a few pics from our wonderful stay in the adventure town of Vang Vieng.
‘Whopping restaurant’, a Japanese run restaurant that do amazing burgers!
Tham Chang cave and tranquil blue lagoon, we arrived too late to go into the cave but we made the most of the bright blue water!
Biking west of town in search of the ‘official’ blue lagoon. We first stopped off for a climb up Pha Ngeun. A sweaty 500m climb (about 400m of which was upwards!) lead to incredible views of the surrounding valleys.
We then heading towards the blue lagoon…
Arriving at the ‘Blue Lagoon’, we were disappointed in it’s ‘blueness’, especially after the beautiful waters of Tham Chang the previous day but the spectacular Tham Pou Kham cave more than made up for it…
When we returned to day light, people had started to jump into the [not so] blue lagoon with some hilarious results…
On the return journey, after a lot of rain we came across a group of men struggling to get a truck out of the mud…so Matt and another tourist gave a helping hand…
That evening, we had dinner at AMD restaurant, rated 1st on TripAdvisor, we’d walked by a few times but it had always been empty so we were reluctant to go in but we plucked up the courage and went for it.
It was a decent meal, nice smoothies but I’m not convinced of it’s number 1 spot, Whopping burger was superior for me.
The following day we went kayaking to see some more caves. We went tubing in Pha Thao cave, this is not for the faint hearted, you basically drag yourself along by clinging onto a rope, hoping that you don’t crash into the sides with too much force. The distance you travel inside the cave is entirely dependant on season and amount of rainfall, sometimes the water level is just too high that you don’t actually fit. Was a fun experience but certainly wouldn’t be for everyone.
We had a short stop at the Elephant cave (Xayyalam Cave Temple), a bit of a disappointing stop really, a small hole in the wall of a mountain that has been turned into a temple housing a Buddha footprint. Named ‘Elephant Cave’ because of a rock inside that looked a bit like an elephant – not enough like an elephant though as they decided to add some man-made tusks to make it a bit more obvious!
We then kayaked about 10km, all the way home down the Nam Song river (the same one we’d previously tubed down).
That evening we witnessed some incredible gymnastic feats whilst watching some everyday people play a game of Takor . (It’s known as a lot of different things throughout South East Asia, but it’s basically kick volleyball) AMAZING!
Just before we caught our bus to Luang Prabang, we had a chat with a French lady who moved to Vang Vieng 4 months ago and works in a coffee/cheesecake shop, she said that it is low low season in September – the worst month of the year for businesses as it is so quiet so it could be completely different (and how I dreaded) at other times of the year when more tourists are around.
