Unhappy Pizza
24 hours after eating our Happy Pizzas, we are still pretty stoned. 48 hours later, we still feel rather strange. The last 2 days have been hell. Who mixes weed and mushrooms?! As if thinking something is trying to kill you isn’t bad enough, now you can see it too!
To be fair, it probably doesn’t help that these were sharing pizzas and we ate a whole one. Each. Still, when in Rome! Or…when in 4000 Islands…
In any case, we’ve made it to Vang Vieng, the Gods only know how.
The journey hasn’t been easy…
Somehow we made it to the dock in the morning, despite being well beyond the boundaries of space and time. A nauseating boat ride later, we made it to the minibus to Pakse, where we changed for an overnight bus to Vientiane.
For 700km, we lay in the bus – right at the very back, next to the engine. There, we sweated out our demons until, spaced out, we were dumped in the bus station. There, we are forgotten. For two hours. Eventually a phone call to the travel people jogs their memory and a minibus turns up to drive up the remaining 155km to Vang Vieng.
Just about anywhere else in the world, 155km in a minibus would take about 2 hours. This, however, is Laos…and it takes 5 hours. At least we don’t break down, as most Loatian buses seem to do.
Luckily, it is worth it. Even through the haze, Vang Vieng is quite a pretty little place and, after much recovery, we book ourselves some kayaking down the river. We are shown some caves along the way, one of which contains a fairly pointless statue of Buddha (I’m certain the population of South East Asia just shoves statues into holes and gets tourists to pay for the honour of peeking), but the other one we get to tube our way through!
Alas, it is the rainy season and the river is too high for us to venture far into it. Still, it is fun whilst it lasts, we don’t drown and the rest of the day spent kayaking and losing at beer pong in the riverside bars more than makes up for it. By the end of the day, we finally feel alive again!
Photo credit for much of this to Vikki!