Busted in Vang Vieng

Vang Vieng is known for its happy menus which in plain old English means drugs. There's no two ways about it. The town is built for tourists and there are plenty of TV screens all over town to keep you from actually exploring the caves, lagoons and villages around the town. It's also a tubing mecca.

A few nights here and the Friend's theme song is etched into your mind. The buckets of drinks are not strong enough to tune out the annoying laugh tracks but they are strong enough to make you walk across a rickety bridge to the island to get your drink on some more. The island is also unfortunately the site of many a drug busts by the local police. I didn't want to be the party pooper and remind everyone of that tidbit of information from the guidebook and sure enough, I spent the night in a Lao police station with a petrified Irish girl who got busted. She was scared out of her mind because the cops didn't want to take the bribe out in the open at the party and instisted she follow them to the police station. The police was suspiciously young (21 years old) and all male. I just grabbed her arm and walked to the station with her. Chris, Andrew and her boyfriend followed us. At one point the cops wanted the girls to take a walk with two of the 'officers' but thankfully none of the guys were to keen on letting us go into the night. She was given two choices: 1) jail or 2) paying money. I wonder how many tourists choose choice number one. We emptied our pockets and got away with a $300 fine as opposed to the 500 they asked for initially. All this took four hours. She was a bit shaky. Her boyfriend was plastered and banging his fists on the police man's desk whilst swigging beer.

That little experience set us back for a little bit. The following day didn't start for me until about 1pm. Chris and I rented bikes and went out to crawl through some caves.

There wasn't enough time to do more exploring, so we convinced those of the group that remained in Vang Vieng to rent motorbikes with us the following day and head out to a larger cave and the blue lagoon.

There was rap music being played at the lagoon and the cave was set a 100 metres up in the limestone hill.

I'm in Vientiane and had a nice couple of days looking around town. Got my Vietnamese visa and met up with Lulu's parents for dinner. They showed me the hospital where life began for Tuc and Lu. Saw their old apartment they lived in. Saw the river they crossed. Where Mr. P went to university. Mrs. P commanded me to "speak francais" with one of her cousins.