G and I have been in and around the little town of Vangvienne for the past few days. It's a sleepy dusty village encircled by green peaked mountains. The place is backpacker central, with every other restuarant stuffed full of musty pillows with people sprawled out watching DVDs of "Friends". I'm not joking, you can stand at the crossroads in the center of town and see and hear no less than 3 tvs playing different episodes of "Friends" at once. Shudder.
And you might have guessed this wasn't exactly our cup of tea, so on our first day we embarked on the other favorite pasttime of the area- tubing down the nearby Song river. This is not exactly a grueling athletic event, as the banks of the river are dotted with little makeshift bars where all the tubers stop to refuel on beer lao and other sports drinks. It was a little bit of a International Spring break vibe, but the cool clean water and gorgeous views of mountains and jungle overhead were enough for us.
Near the end of the 5 k course we heard some crazy drumming and came up on a circle of local guys hammering out irratic rhythms and singing Lao pop songs. They flagged us down and we happily joined the drunken drum circle. The one guy who spoke english OK became de facto leader and kept telling us "Today, you me.. INFORMAL!" laughing and "Later, I take you my home, eat rice." Another guy would get up and dance and sing like a Laotian rock star and everybody would laugh and clap along. Then our man would be like "My friend today.. very drunk." pointing to the singer, while he himself could barely stand. It was all pretty great, and we took a lot of pictures we'll post later.
The day after next we embarked on a two day camping trip with an American kid we'd been meeting up with and three girls from Sweden. The hills and mountains, caves and streams we hiked to were beautiful, we went diving off a secluded waterfall, floated into a submerged cave on innertubes, explored some other caves, had a bonfire under a huge starry sky, and succeded in my quest to touch a cow. This being said, the food was terrible (greasy fried rice everyday, and genevieve chipped a tooth on a pebble in on of hers), we slept on a cow farm on the wooden slat floor of a shack crawling with spiders, we ran of of WATER at one point, the whole thing was badly planned, disjointed and mildly frustrating. So that was that- i really loved the experience but if i had a choice i would have done it a different way.
Anyway when we got back to town I ran into my friend Mike from provincetown randomly and we hung out and had a few meals together. Meanwhile Genevieve got sick and spent the whole day yesterday in bed. We couldn't figure out what it was because i was mildly sick to the stomach also but no one else on the trip was. We got some good sleep last night and G is feeling better today, but we couldnt move on to Luang Prabang like we wanted to today. Well, tommorow we'll be moving up there, then onto our slow boat ride up the mekong ending up back in North Thailand. Peace.