Day 36-42

A couple of the restaurants here play either Friends, Simpson's, or Family Guy. While mid episode of Friends we would hear the beginning of another friends episode across the road. We met some Australians who taught us a fantastic game called "Ship, Ship-ha". The one Australian busted out some pretty cool card tricks, and put David Blane to shame.

Majority of the tourists that hang out at VanVianne spend most of their day floating down the river on inner tubes. The tubes cost $4 to rent, and the tubing company was lending out Mountain Eq. Co-op water proof bags. We slowly floated down the river to a zip line swing that tossed you into the river. Riding the swings into the river had only one underlying condition, you had to buy a BeerLao...... no problem! After mastering the first zip line, and pulling out some back flips, we decided to float to the next swing (or maybe it was because a couple of ten year old girls showed us up on the swing). The next swing had about a 15m drop off. It was goooooood. We timidly took the risk and plummeted into the water. We hoped onto the floating train to the next swings. The next two swings were a tad larger. They had about a 20-30m drop off. We understood why BeerLao was the drink of choice, to ease the pain of the notorious belly flop! However, the belly and back flops proved to be the most entertaining. The third bar along the river had a volleyball court, which we played most of the afternoon then dove off the swing platform to cool down. While floating to the last swing we realized that we were pretty big pansies for being scared of the first swing. We left the last swing just before the sun went down.

All of us woke up the next morning with sore muscles, we had ripped them after all the intensive activity the day before. We lazed around to recover, and got one of the restaurants to play Blazing Saddles, then Little Britain, and we ended the day off with Family Guy. We had a very productive day! We decided to hit up the tubing track again before leaving Lao. We tried leaving Lao on Feb. 27 but were very unsuccessful, so we decided (without any hurt feelings) to hit up the tubing escapade once more. VanVianne has a little gold mine on their hands. We finally left Lao on Feb. 28 on a 22 hr. bus ride to Chiang Mai.