Vang Vieng

Not all psychologists like psychopaths but every psychologist is fascinated by psychopaths, even the ones who don’t admit it¹. After hearing all the horror stories about the decadence of Vang Vieng I was expecting it to be to sociologists what psychopaths are to psychologists. Collective insanity. In a nation with stringent drug laws, Vang Vieng is the only place where authorities turn a blind eye. Magic mushroom pizza, weed and opium are mainstays on the menus of the numerous bars and restaurants. I was prepared for debauchery on an unprecedented scale.

Vang Vieng is in an idyllic setting. There are green, spiky crags jagging out of fertile plains. It is very similar to the scenery around Yangshuo. Unlike Yangshuo, the star attraction isn’t the scenery, Vang Vieng’s star attraction is tubing. You basically rent a rubber tube, float down the river, stopping at bars on the way to drink unbelievably cheap alchohol, and consume pretty much any concoction of drugs that you can imagine. There are zip lines and huge rope swings with little to no safety regulations. I was told by a drunken Scotsman who works in one of the bars that 28 people died tubing last year, some drowned whilst out of their faces, others let go of the rope swings at the wrong moment and fell into shallow water and hit rocks. I’m allergic to rubber dinghies and can’t swim very well either but wasn’t feeling it; I didn’t bother with the whole tubing phenomena.

I managed to find a cafe in Vang Vieng that neither had Friends nor Family Guy playing on repeat. The next day I got a bed with Wi-Fi and spent a ridiculous amount of time in my room, writing long e mails to friends, relaxing, eating fruit salad, meditating and sleeping. I lay in bed one afternoon and closed my eyes. Images of all the faces I’ve seen on my journey started racing through my head. I saw smile upon smile upon smile and heard shouts of ‘ni hao’, ‘hello’ and ‘sabaideeeeeeeeeeeee’. The images in my head made me laugh so much I had tears rolling down my face. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. I’ve met some crackers.

I also did lots of research on what my options for the near future are and how best to go about them whilst every other foreigner in town was out tubing. It’s quite complicated. Bangkok is the major transport hub for South East Asia but I don’t know when I will arrive there. I’ll get a 15 day Thai visa but some of the applications for countries I considered visiting could potentially take far longer to process than the 15 days I’d have in Thailand waiting for the applications to be processed. The world just isn’t cut out for people who like to do things on a whim. A more complicated issue than border restrictions was deciding what I wanted to do in the short term future. What is rational, what is feasible and what my heart says are all at odds with one another. I decided to leave proper decision making until Vientiane.

I felt very lonely whenever I was out of my room. I had envisioned the SE Asia backpacking scene to be full of artisans, writers, musicians and poets and have found it to be full of what I term consumerist hippies. They are obsessed with buying all the accessories to make them look free-spirited and avante garde but there mentality is very similar to the materialistic, conventional western one. They live structured, predictable lives; they do not seek adventure, just token gestures of it. They do not seek to learn about the world, they seek to reaffirm their beliefs about it. I’ve found it very difficult to find people I can relate to. They just seem to do what ever the Lonely Planet tells them. As a touring cyclist, I've become an anti consumerist in my quest to travel light. I look at my bundle of possessions and instinctively ask myself, 'hmmmm, what do I have here that I don't actually need', 'how can I have less'? I enjoy washing my clothes in the streams, it's the most therapeutic time of day for me. I know that there are musicians, writers and poets out there but it’s just hard to find them amongst the crowd of mindless louts when everyone looks the bohemian. 

I went out for a wander one night and bumped into Nicki (whom I met in Yangshuo) and her friends from Hong Kong who were doing a mini tour of SE Asia for the Chinese New Year holiday. I had one beer, used a slight niggling feeling in my sciatic nerve as a justification to smoke some opium then went home. All the opium did was make my breath taste like I was 15 again. The following night I had two beers with the aforementioned Scotsman who works in one of the bars. His day job is at the river, his evening job is to pull his kilt up to reveal that he’s a true Scotsman then tell the revellers which bar he thinks they should go to next. He loves his job. He’d only been doing it for 5 days. His methyl amphetamine addicted colleagues who’d been doing it for a while seemed less happy about their position. One of the girls reminded me of the sort of people I grew up with. She looked gaunt, depressed and unhealthy but there was still a hint of her former beauty despite the enthusiasm for life having been long sucked out of her. It was quite sad to see. The stories of Vang Vieng being a cesspit and haven for moral decadence didn’t really ring true with me. The aggressive drunks and drug addicts felt too familiar, and in fairness to Vang Vieng, the ‘aggressive’ westerners, weren’t even THAT aggressive and the 'moral decadence' is known as a night out where I come from. I got told by the Flashing White Sergeant (I apologise for the terrible Scottish pun) that the Laos gangs who control the drugs trade (and the police) show no tolerance for yob behaviour and show little restraint in their heavy handed treatment of those who don’t treat the locals with respect. Fair enough. I didn’t get into the swing of the Vang Vieng party lifestyle. I found myself just sitting there, not really speaking to people, not fitting in and struggling to think of things to say on the odd occasion I did chat to someone. I was happiest when chatting to friends and family online. I had no motivation to get drunk and try my luck with any of the beleaguered, drunken bikini clad western women staggering about the town with their bottles of Beerlao in hand, despite the fact that my porridge making skills alone could have seduced at least 30 or 40 of them.

It wasn't as bad a place as I had envisioned, it just seemed a bit out of place seeing that sort of behaviour in a country where the norms are so different. I was glad to get back on my bike.