More tales from the tubing.

| June 21st, 2009 | Vang Vieng

With Toby in town and a days recovery under our belts it was finally time to get our tube on with him. Up at the crack of noon we got a quick bite and bought our tubes then piled into a tuk tuk for another day of floaty fun, a beer to start with at the first bar (walk before we run) then it was head first into the buckets.

Toby being quite the Jack the lad he was straight up on the rope swings, hanging by his legs and all sorts… He did however manage to land badly and knock the wind out of himself on the first one and by the time he managed to scrape himself out and back into the bar he was bright red but loving being back in Laos.

By the time we reached the second bar we were all well and truly pissed and the zip wire was screaming out… Drink, drink, drink… Splash, splash, splash.

The whole day carried on the same and as we floated down to the last few bars I’d had enough booze to think a go on the rope swings was a top idea (up until then I had only been swooping about on the zip line) and I also thought that on my first go a full back flip would be the only way to fly… Amazingly, I dropped out of the tree swooped over the river, swang my legs up, let go of the swing and tucked my knees (here’s the important part) UP BESIDE MY HEAD and with all the grace of a professional gymnast flipped end over end until I bombed into the river below. The guys who work for the bar threw a rope and pulled me back in and I stood on the steps to watch Toby have a shot… He grabbed the swing – swooped down over the water – kicked his legs – let go and TUCKED HIS KNEES IN FRONT OF HIS HEAD – flipped a 
few times and hit the water. Almost a success except that when he came up he was totally limp and knocked out cold by his own knees. Obviously anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely healthy admiration for David Hasselhoff and on seeing my man Toby floating down the river like a turd I dived in and swam over with all the grace and speed of a power boat. I grabbed hold of him and started swimming back and the chaps on the side threw me a ring and pulled us back in to shore, Toby had come round again by the time we were back on dry land but he was a little shaky so I left him with Georgie while I got our bucket and got a stiff drink down his neck…

Toby got his stuff back together, got a few more drinks in him and had a couple more attempts at a back-flip but the bad landings and booze had started to take it’s toll, Georgie wisely stuck to the zip lines and on the last bar I pulled another flip and also landed badly, not quite knocking myself out but slapping the water so hard it felt like my whole back was severely sunburned… After that we stuck to the whiskey until sunset when we all staggered back into town for food before bed.

The next morning Toby and I both woke up in agony, battered and bruised from the swings – we felt like death warmed up and no amount of Tiger balm could ease it. Georgie was luckily just suffering from a hangover and all it took was a nice portion of eggs to put her back together…

We’d met a cool bunch of people on the river the day before and all planned on meeting up for a second day of it, midday at the first bar. We got there around 1pm and the other slowly arrived by around 3pm and by the time we got rid of the first few buckets we were sore but rearing to go all over again.

The day followed the same sort of pattern as the previous – too much drinking and too much Tarzan like swinging, but as the previous day… Mucho fun was had. We even managed to start a mud fight at one of the bars which has a couple of big mud pits. Anyway, by the time we arrived back in town for drunken dinner we were all feeling the strain, we had sores on our sores and it felt like we had all been run over by a train. We scoffed our grub down in the way only a drunk person can and then gave our tubes to the kids in the restaurant, they had already started playing with them while we were eating and to be honest we didn’t have the heart to take them away from them. Almost paralysed we all hobbled back to our guest house to shower off, Toby and Georgie went out for a couple more drinks at a bar in town but I was too beat up so I got all basted up with Tiger balm and laid as still as possible…