Tubing in Vang Vieng

First off: you don’t need a tube to go tubing, but get one at least once, otherwise it’s not tubing, is it?

To hire a tube, it was 115 000 kip, 60 000 of that is the deposit for the tube, which has to be returned by 6pm that day. Needless to say we didn’t get our deposits back, we weren’t back in time, nor did we have our tubes. The 115 000 includes the 10 000 kip tuk tuk ride to the starting point on the river. People tend to begin between 12-2pm, any later and you don’t get very far down the river and to many bars before it gets dark.


The first bars are the busiest and are also the big bars in town: Q Bar and Bucket Bar. This is when the marker pens come out. Virtually every bar has a swing to jump from into the river, zip line or slide. The Q Bar has someone videoing the action, which you can watch that night in the bar in town and either cringe or revel in your new found fame! We had our porn names scrawled on our arms (Dizzy Harding, if you’re wondering). Also threads tied on our wrists for free buckets that night in town. A lot of the river bars had free drinks, shots of Laos whisky, best drunk in one go with all your senses turned off. Yes, breakfast is a very good idea before tubing.

You can buy water at the bars, but buckets followed by beer are the most popular ways to get drunk - water and free drinks are another, cheaper method.

Next door to the Q Bar is the  Bucket Bar, again offering free shots, plus marker penning and red scraps of fabric with ‘witty’ comments on them - if you can read the comments.

Basically you drink, jump off rope swings, zip lines, chat, drink, dance and generally have fun. That’s tubing in one sentence, except mention of riding down the river in an inner tube from one bar to another.

• 1st Warning: There are biting insects out there and they are persistent. Some bars offer chalk to cover yourself in, but it doesn’t seem to work, it just seems an excuse for people to chalk each other up, which can be fun in itself, but you still get bitten! I had 150 plus bites at last count and even a masseuse in Luang Prabang was concerned with which lurgy I’d picked up, not fun.

There are stories of people breaking bones on the swings, but we were all fine and just didn’t use the ones where the people said the water was too shallow. One swing even broke when a friend jumped off from the tower and he was OK, rather sore from the landing, but otherwise no problems, unfortunately it was the one person who was scared of heights, so it did put him (and the rest of us) off from having another go once it was fixed.

I have no idea how many bars there are along the river, we made it to about 9 or 10 over 2 days, including one I swam to on a sandal rescue mission. But it was low season so many bars weren’t open. We probably averaged 4 or 5 a day, but the first 2 were the busiest and best.

The Mud Bar was fun, though very quiet, it had a mud volley ball court, mud tug of war and if there were enough people it could and did get interesting.

As we went with a bunch of guys who didn’t hire tubes, they, at some points, tagged along to ours. Though at one stage I was evicted, 2 of them jumped in mine and headed off down the river with me hanging on. I did try and climb on to make three of us on one tube, at their encouragement, but it was an awkward business of not tipping it over or causing physical damage to one of the guys! So I either swam or dangled off the edge and we made it successfully to the next bar. Thankfully the water was deep enough so swimming was easy in that part, unlike over the rapids, where you end up with rocks bashing your legs and feet constantly - tubes are useful then.

To get to a bar as you’re ‘zooming’ down the river a person who works for the bar throws a full water bottle attached to a rope at you or your tube. You catch the bottle or rope and get pulled to the bar, if you don’t want to go to that bar, just don’t catch the bottle.

• 2nd Warning: Avoid getting hit by the water bottles, they are full and hurt if they hit you.

Some bars are harder to get to than others, especially when you’re bare foot. There are rocks, wooden steps all very slippery and can cause injuries, especially if you’re drunk.

• 3rd Warning: don’t take footwear with you, you’ll lose them or they will be acquired by someone else who’s lost theirs. Or your friends could just keep throwing them in the river as they are incredibly ugly and you give up rescuing them.

Lots of bars encourage you in with free drinks or cocktails for the ‘ladies’ anything free is pretty vile, but always alcoholic.

• 4th Warning: Tubes get stolen, you can’t do much about it as you add your tube to the pile at the landing point and you’re too busy having fun to keep an eye on them, so accept that fact and you can lose your tube and deposit.

It quietens down on the river as it gets closer to 5.30 and people head back to return their tubes. But if yours have been stolen, there’s no rush to get back. So for us another bar beckoned, which we ended up taking over and sorting out the tunes and partied as the sun set.

• 5th Warning: You can get robbed tubing, keep an eye on your cash and don’t take anything with you that you wouldn’t want to lose. We had out money taken from our waterproof bag, which made getting back by tuk tuk and paying the 10 000 kip a case of borrowing from one another. Thankfully everyone seemed to keep an eye on my camera and it made it safely home.

At this point it was dark, everyone says to get back to town before dark, but no one said why, anyway we were having fun.

The reason why they say get back before dark is to avoid getting ripped off, pick pocketed etc by the tuk tuk people. Plus, it saves walking across fields in the dark, barefoot and being abducted by locals. Don’t go alone, I had to be rescued by my friends when I was adopted by a local guy who had a grip like a vice, but thanks to Clem appearing by my side, the  other guy backed off. It could have been creepy, but we were a group so all was fine. Plus I could have just done my usual: shouting loudly and being a rather aggressive female westerner and that normally stops any trouble, also being taller helps! After trudging through the fields to the tuk tuk point, trying to avoid the spiky plants, over styles, ditches etc in the pitch black, we were told that we had to pay up front before we left. All well and good, until one guy was pick pocketed there and then and I discovered we’d been robbed too (in a bar), so paying up front was difficult and much arguing ensued over being robbed. We managed to strike a deal for all of us to be taken back and those that hadn’t been robbed paid for everyone else. Luckily for me the tuk tuk driver knew I’d paid (thanks Adrian) so he was going to take me back, but I wasn’t going on my own! Thanks guys for sorting that one out.

We made it back to town by 8.30, too late for any free buckets and in need of showers and two and a half hours after virtually everyone else to tell our horror stories and to get clean.

Second day we went tubeless and it was a much quieter day on the river. Sam and I headed off and the first two bars were nearly empty, so we jumped into the water and swam down to the Jungle Bar, where we were pulled in by the water bottle rope guys. There’s a rope swing there, so he and I had a go and then headed off to the next bar, bumping painfully, with many ows along the rapids, as the water was low and the rocks were high. Trying to get out of the water was a big challenge, sharp, slippery rocks, a fast moving river made it difficult, but we succeeded! After investigating a few bars, we decided to head back upstream to find our mates and more people. And there they all were in the first bar, slowly adding to their drunkeness from the past week and some of them looking particularly rough. I did a tandem rope swing with Dan, where he threatened to land on me once we’d tried to hold on for as long as we possibly could - he missed me by a very small margin, thanks! We all did a few more swings, until it broke and no one trusted it any more, no matter how drunk anyone was. So we walked to the next bar where everyone was beginning to fade after days of partying and we headed back to town just as it was getting dark. There were plenty of tuk tuks to take us back, though the one we got it broke down so we had to swap. We seemed fated with tuk tuks.

So that’s tubing, getting drunk on a river in a inner tube in the middle of Laos with pretty views, if you bother to look, oh and great fun!

This is one of my favourite photos from my travels, it sums it all up, matching sunglasses, tops, girls in bikinis, guys trying to look cool. Dan trying to strangle me, Clem looking rough as ever, John posing, Adrian with a beer, Sam with his bucket and the girls looking gorgeous, plus it was snapped just as I got the giggles (I have no idea what was said, but it was probably Sam or Dan being rude!) - and it’s the happiest I’ve looked in a photo for a long time, if nothing else a good bunch of friends (you met hours or days ago) and tubing down a river is good for your soul.