With that in mind, you can expect this blog to follow suit and there will be a photograph of a hippy I briefly spoke to and a water slide above a river. I can only imagine your excitement and I'm pretty sure some of you have already scrolled hastily down to soak up these images and have now lost your sentence. Back yet? Good, I hope they were all you had dreamed they would be.
Little Spoon and I were on a bus to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is a small town in the mountains of Laos that is famous for people getting in tubes (rubber rings in the UK) and sailing down a river whilst stopping off at river side shacks to drink beer and maybe smoke drugs. It is also incredibly beautiful and whilst it is certainly more spoilt than it was 7 years ago when I last visited, if you are in the off season I think it is still quite mellow and well worth a visit.
It is purely for backpackers. This was great news for me as I had a backpack. Little Spoon had a suitcase on wheels and looked as out of place as a person with a huge lollypop wearing a traditional Vietnamese hat might have looked.
As she dragged her suitcase across the uneven terrain it struck me that we should stay in the exact same guesthouse that I had stayed at with my friend Montgomery Burns seven years before. Montgomery Burns and I had travelled around for 3 months, slumming it in any old dump and we had both sported backpacks. I don't recall either of us wearing any hats or having oversized confectionary, so I felt duty bound to give Little Spoon a taste of real backpacking.
The only stumbling point was that the place was a bit of a hovel seven years ago and the only redeeming feature I could recall was a laminated picture of some horses hanging from the wall outside our room.
I booked us in. Little Spoon was appalled and terrified. The room was squalid and most rats would probably avoid the bathroom for fear of catching something. It was going to be difficult to win Spoon over, as she had already started ranting and had taken her hat off to show she was serious.
Little Spoon: "No. No I wont stay here. This is not funny. Uggghhhhhh....I wont shower in there. Why do you want to be here?"
Me: "I don't want to stay here, I just thought we should."
Little Spoon: "What? Why? If it was crap seven years ago, then why come back? Are you stupid?"
I resent being called stupid by someone with a wheely suitcase in a town clearly delineated as a "backpacker" destination. But the filth and dilapidation was hard to justify. And then as we stood arguing outside our room, I saw it. The one thing that would win her over. Incredibly after seven long years, it was still there. The laminated picture of some horses. Not a photograph, just a badly drawn piece of "art" encased in thin plastic and now curled at the edges but still taped onto the wall.
Me: "The HORSES! Spoon. Remember the horses I told you about. Look at them, come on, that's a piece of history right there. My God, when I email Montgomery Burns about this, he will be cockahoop."
She seemed stunned by my combination of misplaced enthusiasm and use of the antiquated term "cockahoop".
We agreed to stay there. I don't know if the horses won the day or if she was too tired to move on, but we left the room and made our way to eat but not before she had used her new favourite word. A word that she seemed to try and use at least once an hour. Shaking her head at me in disgust...
Little Spoon: "Erroneous. You're erroneous."
I feel her use of the word erroneous is quite often...well...erroneous, but I let this one slide.
To sum up Vang Vieng it is best to just explain that in the central point of town you sit on beds eating food and drinking while TV screens play episodes of Friends and you play Connect Four as you look at vast swathes of jungle covered mountains. It's a bizarre juxtaposition but very enjoyable.
I had obviously ignored the leaflets offering anything to do with elephants, but we were all set for tubing the next day. We took a Tuk Tuk up to the starting point at the top of the river and before we embarked we joined a gaggle of hippies in drinking buckets of cheap whisky with red bull. Amongst the hippies were some normal people who I was able to discuss normal topics with. Things like politics, beer, evolution and the use of horse based pictures in the hospitality industry.
But the hippies kept distracting me. They were spray painting words and pictures on peoples backs. Random words and shit pictures.
Hippy: "Hey man, I'll spray something on you, I've got all these templates."
I looked at his templates. They said "Ooo La La", "Sexy" and "Pimp". I wasn't sure that men who controlled sex workers really fell into the usual category of love and peace, but apparently it was ironic. Looking at most of them, I assumed that "Sexy" was also being used ironically.
Me: "No."
The Hippy looked forlorn. Good, maybe I would tell him that I didn't believe in global warming too and that I was only at the river to dump my old fridge. He looked at Little Spoon. Oh great.
Little Spoon and I wandered towards the river edge to begin tubing. She was just up ahead of me as I'd bought another bucket of whisky, but the bright red "Ooo La La" across her back meant I couldn't miss her. Oh and here is a hippy playing with a local child...
There was one problem with our plan to tube. We hadn't hired tubes. Somehow in our haste we had ignored the instructions to hire tubes in the town and thought we could get them at the river bars. Our assumption was quite definitely erroneous.
So we had to go tubing without a tube. Little Spoon was very worried as she is not much of a swimmer. However, I began to feel it might not be so bad. As a young boy at school I experienced a devestating school rule that banned footballs in the playground after a window was broken.
Unperturbed my friends and I organised football games without a ball. Twenty small six year old boys running around the pitch screaming and arguing about who had the imaginary ball. There were many contentious decisions and some heavily disputed results, but I scored some of my greatest ever goals with that non existent ball and put in more man of the match performances than I ever managed once a ball was re-introduced.
With this in mind, I felt that tubing without a tube might turn out to be brilliant. So Little Spoon clung to my back like a baby monkey and I played the role of a tube perfectly. Swimming down the river and stopping at bars to top up on alcohol and watch maniacs slide headfirst into the often shallow waters of the river.
Drinking and swimming down a river with no safety regulations in check is hugely enjoyable and hugely stupid. People drown every month apparently. Oh well, I'll assume they are all hippies with stupid slogans sprayed on their body, and shrug it off as a blessing to the gene pool.
I didn't drown and neither did Little Spoon. And apart from one moment in a strong current with rocks where I cut my knees to ribbons it was great being a human tube.
I could waffle on about Laos for many a blog to come, but it would only interest me, so I will spare you the details but leave you with a scintillating picture of a water slide from which a hippy knocked out all of his teeth the day before we arrived. Ooo La La!
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