It's been a little while, huh? Well I was busy, so there. Been occupied with one thing and another, a fair bit of traversing between Laotian towns and along rivers, and in the middle of tropical storms and powercuts and all the rest I managed to do myself an injury and had to take a couple of days off to let the swelling go down.

So I have been a little bit less sober recently too (could you guess by the latest installemnt of the Evilhippy Injury Programme??! ), and pretty much took yesterday off as well after the American-induced madness that has been Vang Vieng and Vientiane.

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Let us start with the customary nonsense and gibberish I've accumalated about this new country:

Laos is a largely undeveloped country amid more famed though often equally underdeveloped nations; with the ubiquitous traveller's destination of Thailand to the West, the Dead Kennedy's most lampoonable nation and Pol Pot's former-playground, also sometimes known as Cambodia, to the South; and the best country with which to tease Americans to the East, Vietnam. Not only is it in the midst of more star-seeking neighbours, but for one reason or another it has until quite recently remained blessedly hidden from the world's eye as well as the ocean's arms, surrounding it on all sides as its neighbours do seems to have prevented much of it from getting out to the world, and precious little of the outside world bleeding into it.
And then there's China flanking the Northern lands too, of course

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The currency of Laos is the Kip, and there are, get ready, approximately 17,445 Kip to the Pound. Yeah, that sounds like fun every time you wanna work out ya budget, huh?
A few basic costs and conversions: A good main meal in a good restaurant typically costs around 45,000 Kip (£2.58p), a bottle of water from a stall or shop is 4000 Kip which is as much, or little, as a pack of cheap cigarettes. 4000 Kip = £0.23p, and for comparison a pack of Marlboros is 15,000 Kip (£0.86p) or more than 3 and a half times the price just for the better brand.
The fact that 20 cigarettes cost the same as a bottle of mineral water is thought-provoking on both counts; that water is overpriced and cigarettes underpriced so very drastically shows up some serious differences to our Western way of thinking.

A night at a cheap guesthouse is about 80,000 Kip (£4.58p) for a double (singles don't exist of course ) a nicer guesthouse is about 120,000 Kip (£6.88p) per double room per night, and at a hotel, a nice hotel, like the one I stayed in when I first got to Vientiane, is $18 US per night, or 157,000 Kip, or £9.00p

That 157,000 Kip, that £9, gets you room service, a hotel with a respectable amount of marble and fake hand-carved wooden panelling in the lobby, proper hotel service regards towels you can steal, soap you can hoard and favours you can call on from the staff, and a good clean room with a perk or two, a swimming pool maybe if you're lucky, or a free internet connection or something similar.

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The capital city of Laos and arguably the finest capital I've seen; and as it is so silly having arguments with yourself I'll settle it right now and say that it IS the finest I've seen yet; is Vientiane, a grid-layout of streets a few miles wide by a few miles long, itself a former French colony with many street and business names in French and Laos and few in English, with overall fewer cars than cats in the streets, and infinitely more smiles on faces than anywhere in my home country. It is such a very quiet, calm and friendly place, and now is the highest season building up to the Laos (or Laotian) new year, so I can only guess how relaxed and chilled out it is at the far opposite end of the calendar.

I first noted and adored the way that daily street life here seems so relaxed, the manner of everyone in shops and restaurants seems equally calm and affable too, and this makes every little daily activity so very untaxing it almost seems like a bad idea to ever leave. As it is, once I had left I came back; this is my second time in the city already.

However, the excitement factor of the place as a whole ranks somewhere between `drunk night in` and `drunk night out` and there is very little else to do for visceral entertainment. Thankfully there are some lovely temples and monuments in the city, most of which I have somehow managed to avoid seeing properly, but still I've made it to a few of the more famous architectural heaps and the designers thereof, and the and crazed pagoda-whittlers involved in their construction, both appear to have been highly skilled.

Still, after an initial triumphant collapse the evening I arrived and a day of lounging around, scouting out hotels for the impending arrival of the yankee (Greg), getting my bearings of the city and seeing a couple of easy landmarks, I was kinda keen to go do something the next day, something a little bit different. Like getting steaming drunk with people :lol:

Well it was different for me at the time. I've had a few more days of reckless boozing since then, most of them, in fact, except one int he middle after busting myself in the leg/back/ribs/armpit and then the last couple have been very restrained, too. Nonetheless there were a couople of days of steady relentless boozing - such is life in Laos and it's not all bad.
I've only managed one nice little injury falling into a massive hole in pitch darkness, and Greg almost went into seizures on the river, so between us we're doing pretty well

After a couple of days of drinking, temple-watching and guesthouse negotiating Greg, the two girls he dragged with him (one Jamie and Tabby, Americans both as well) and I went by Laotian sweat-bus 4 hours due North to a town called Vang Vieng, far smaller than Vientiane and populated equally by Farang (tourists/foreigners) and Laotians, and where the chief activity besides drinking lots is drinking lots and lots and floating down a massive river in a big rubber ring.
Also there are some wonderful natural caves to see (apparently) and much more lovely scenery around the place (so they tell me) and possibly even more incredible sights and sounds that I wasn't gonna get my arse out of the riverside bars to see or the hotel with free WiFi internet access in our room to go check out.

It has been pretty well ordered for all that, but yes, I've been out or in on the sauce at least 4 times in the last week and a bit so I'm acutely aware of how much reckless abandon this is, and what it means to my liver and my mental state.

Vang Vieng seems to be a town of only a few thousand or so, small, chilled, popular and still quiet, and ranged alongside a river where most of the visitors - themselves almost totally Western - spend their time.
This river is cool. This river is rather more diverting than most, in fact. This river is where we silly Farang float downstream in the middle of a load of tractor-tyre inner tubes and get hauled over rapids; shanghai'ed into dozens of bars that exist only on the river side - there is no bar or counter on land but only on a jetty half-on, half-off the water; drifted lazily along miles of almost deserted deeps; and have spears thrown at them by the locals.
Yeah, spears - how cool is that?
They may be blunt, well aimed, and be tied by a loose cable to the relevant bars so that the actual purpose of the things is to drag punters into whichever venue by hauling them in from midstream, but still the Indiana Jones atmosphere is what actually counts and is what is actually coolest

A whole day of this meant drinking in buckets, which is the preffered methind of getting the farang population wasted in Vang Vieng. On entering active drinking service in the province and provisioning the duty officer at the bar with sufficient Kip, you are issued with: 1 plastic beach bucket, 4 straws, a handful of limes and lemons, several cans of Red Bull, and many many measures of Tiger whisky or Lao Lao, all pre-assembled in a compact delivery package ready to be used on the front lines of your own personal battle with sobriety.
Lao Lao is the local poison and that's a good word for it: it is strong, rough and very plentiful, and I can't even be bothered to make a joke about some celebrity scandal or other.
Oh waitasec - "Kobe Bryant". There you go

There are in fact lot of things this country lends its name to, the word Lao or Laos (pronounced `plough` for the most part, although `louse` also works fine. Everyone uses both names inside the country, but you feel a bit of a fool asking people about it when you're outside, as if everyone else automatically knows and that you missed a public announcement or something) gets used for all sorts of things, all of which besides the drink I have presently forgotten, but I'll get back to you on this one ASAP, promise

That river though - oh! Man alive, it is cool. We presented ourselves at the tubing place around the corner from out hotel and after handing over sufficient multi-colored and many-numbered notes (40,000 Kip, £2.29p) we were bundled into a tuk-tuk and sent a few milers up stream and then deposited into our tubes and set off along the water.
The tubes were, for your reference, about 3 feet across on the outside and are quite literally tyre inner-tubes, from something industrial-sized like tractors or 6-wheeler lorries. You stick yourself in, drift on the lazy current, and within 400 yards and the first bend in the river the first bar loom up, someone lobs a bamboo spear at you with a plastic bottle on the end as a marker, and you, of course, oblige and waddle into the place after your arduous sea voyage

The next 7 hours or so are a succession of the same sorts of places with some wonderful diversions to ease the `boredom` - namely whacking great zip lines and rope swings set up over the water, right across the path of wayfaring Farang tubers, where you detach yourself from your group at which ever bar you're at and, after a brief queue, hurl yourself either down a zip line or from one end of a massive pulley-type affair, and depending where you let go you can drop from about 8 feet to about 30 feet straight into the water.
Generally these things are timed to avoid passing co-habitants of the river, of course

I only went off once, dropped at the high end of the second swing so only maybe 15 - 20 feet into the water, but fuck me was that fun! I had to leave glasses on shore which really helped (as did all the fear-quenching laoLao in my system ) as if I had been able to focus on the water's surface I probably would have done my usual brick shitting routine and ran away screaming. Greg went at least 6 times on the first day, from the biggest swing on the river and generally from the top of the highest possible arc, the smarmy show-off git

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Great day - only slight hitch was that we stayed out a little late, and it was pitch black while we were still on the river. I of course being the impatient, impetuous bastard that I am stomped off cluthing my giant rubber tube and set off through the shallows to a pebbled island, and to a pice of land I could discern form the background by the lights of a distant bar. This was a istake, as we shall see.

I fought my way through some troiublesome undergrowth and stomped, angrily and rashly, through utter darkness, a reckless thought that I didn't care what I trod on or in even flashed through my mind, which was ironic and, as it happen, completely wrong because when I footed forward with a purposeful stride straight into a 7 foot hole and landed heavily and badly at the bottom, smashing my ribcage againt some wodden stakes stodd upright in one corner, and being followed by a heavy cascade of powdery earth all over me, I was far from indifferent. I was fucking livid, to be quite frank, and I told the world exactly what I thought of it, in loud, impolite tones.

I was rescued after a mere 20 minutes of belting out every cussword I could recall in any and every language I had control of which isn't many, but I did manage a couple of select German obscenities which were suitably horrific, I believe.
I had fallen on my right ankle, which I have busted up before pretty well, and the ligaments seemed to have done the same sort of thing already well known and loathed; got twisted, torn, and swollen up in self-defence.

I also hit a post on the way down which gouged a little flesh from my inner arm just into the armpit taking the skin almost back to the muscle, which was quite special and tender especially under the ministrations of the Americans armed with raw alcohol *winces* but it was evidently quite pointy, whatever it was I hit, so it's only a mercy that it didn't go through my shoulder or pass between any ribs and do anything serious to the old lungs.
I've got a shitload of other assorted scrapes and cuts from other things that were in the hole (steel hedgehogs and razorwire, apparently) but aside from abdomenal pains I can only assume are light inner tissue bruising (and will clear up in a week if they are) there's nothing of any real trouble, just got a tender and slightly swollen ankle.
That was about 4 days ago I think, maybe 5, and I've been walking on it fully for at least the last 2 days except for on stairs, which are the devil's fucking elevators and no mistake!

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Now I know it's been several days, but right now I have little else to report on. Besides, I really need to get those poxy photos updated - I'll chuck some more stuff at you as soon as I can inlcuding many more photos, but the internet connections here aren't as great as I first thought, and there is no WiFi here (we barely had it at the place in Vang Vieng, as it happened) much, so I dunno.

All I have to mention, really, are the awesomeness of Buddha statues, the insane rudeness of an English hotel manager in Vang Vieng, the overall similarities I can discern from the few Asian countires I've seen so far, and my immediate travel plans.
Greg and I offloaded the two American girls this morning and we are heading to Cambodia, hopefully tomorrow. From there it's probably into Malaysia for me maybe via Bangkok again, for Greg it's probably Australia via Bangkok to go sort out his new career, study course and future, not to load the poor man with too much mental burden.

We'll probably be seeing a little more of Thailand anyway and that would be great for me, you, and all of us both/many/whatever, because it did seem such a lovely place