I'm going with james Bond title ripoffs now - well there are so many to choose from! hehehe

So yes, less of the bitterness and more of the merriment - it's only money after all and the camera is totally replaceable, I can work two or three jobs in New Zealand and make my fingers bleed if necessary - and hey, it wouldn't be the first time

So after the buddha park near Vientiane we went to a little town called Vang Vieng, still in Laos, but a whole different style and pace.
Oh boy was this place messy - myself, gregory, and two American girls by the names of Tabby (Tabitha) and Jamie all went here on some average Asian bus (bad roads, good company, just a little non-critical spinal trauma from the seatbacks/potholes) ride and arrived, weary and in need of a drink to stay in and a place to slake our thirst.
You can interchange those two terms pretty much as you like over there.

So we got to a hotel after a brief scouring of the Lonely Planet, found a bar/guesthouse run by the rudest English prick you ever could meet who was, somehow, strangely likeable. As long as you did whatever it was that he liked, and nothing he didn't.
Case in point; here are the house rules, as posted in every single guest room:

You just gotta take what you can, sometimes. This place had everything though - free WiFi internet, free pool table in the lobby, comfy chairs and a proper greasy English menu. And proper greasy English yobbishness with every order - it was just like most of my favourite pubs back home

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In and around the town, and from the roof of our hotel (where dark deeds were often afoot...) I got a few snaps - Vang Vieng was permanently in the shadow of a thunderstorm due to the high surrounding hills, and when it rained, it poured - cats, dogs, sheep, buffalo, manatees and what seemed some very angry hippopotami straight down from the skies.

When fair it looked a little bit like this:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/166.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/170.jpg

Check out the purple poster :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/163.jpg

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Tubing.

And then of course there was the tubing.... we drunk our bodyweight in cocktails each, easily, threw ourselves off rope swings, canyon swings and ziplines into the water (well, Greg did, I did a big swing thing and left it at that; bloody good fun though) and much exhaustive merriment was had by all.

The prices in Laos Kip make it hard to spend any real kind of money, but still we thought we had international economic duty to foist as much Dollar, Sterling and Thai Baht onto the good Laos people as was possible, so we emptied about three day's budget into the bars along the river. Each.

Tubing itself is, well, sitting in a big inflated rubber tube, coasting gently along a slow river, catching the rope-tied spears thrown by the bar workers at you and hauling yourself into their establishments one at a time.

It's a hard life sometimes:

A lovely Aussie girl called Cam:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2938.jpg

Myself and Tabby making out like I'm some kind of pet dog or something, scratchign my belly.
I didn't really mind - this was about 7 cocktails past sunrise so pretty much anything was cool by this point:

Jamie in the foreground, piss-drunk. And greg in the background, setting the trned and leading the way; totally piss-drunk:

Us all, I think, and some Dutch guys we befriended:

Tabby again and someone:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2929.jpg

Jamie languishing langourously, enticing Greg with her wiley wiles :

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2928.jpg

I can't even see this one:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2925.jpg

Mojitos!!

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2916.jpg

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2921.jpg

A part of the river:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2821.jpg

Part of the river and part of one of the bars - they are all pretty much on stilts to cope with the monsoon rising of the river:

Rivery stuff:

Some of us in the tubes progressing stately-like (ahem) down the river:

And some more:

And some more!:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b312/evilhippy/Worldwide%203/IMG_2807.jpg

And this is what it looked like to start with. Or finish with. Like I can remember - I ended the day by throwing myself down a hole taller than I was and tearing the ligaments in my ankle all to hell.
Other than that, though, it was proper grand

By the way all photos - ALL photos of the tubing are courtesy of Greg over at www.wanderingnerd.com because I didn't take my camera with me and he had the foresight and mental faculties to kit himself out with a dry bag.
Cheers to ya once again mate

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Next up is the new year's waterfight in Thailand...