February 17-20, 2016: Vang Vieng Shenanigans

After our long and grueling kayaking trek on the Nam Ou River, we made our way down to Vang Vieng to explore and enjoy this notoriously wild party city. Check out our adventures below!

Miles walked: 6
Miles transported: ~140

After multiple hours and various methods of transportation, we were happy to arrive in Vang Vieng in time to catch the sunset over the Nam Song River:

Had dinner at a restaurant on the river where you literally sit on tiny wooden rafts, inches from the water, fearing for yourself and all your belongings while you eat (exaggeration, obviously, but as you can see we WERE pretty darn close to the water…):

Shortly after we sat down, we were joined by a rowdy group of Chinese tourists. And when I say joined, I literally mean joined:

Yoav even got to practice his Chinese!! (note – totally worth watching the whole video, but if you don’t feel like committing 48 whole seconds of your life to this, skip ahead to 25 seconds)

Pretty soon we were all taking shots of rice wine from a jug that they brought over from China:

And then this happened:

In case you don’t feel like watching the video, here’s a photo recap:

Fostering USA/Israel/China relations:

The fun was not over yet! Our night of enriching international relations was only just beginning. We made our way to the infamous Sakura Bar, where South Korean teenagers dominated the dance floor, raging to fantastic K-pop hits:

And I had the chance to fulfill a lifelong (well, not really lifelong, but like, 4 year-long) dream of dancing the Gangnam Style with fellow South Koreans. To say it was magical would be an understatement. It was a dream come true:

After nursing our rice wine/K-pop hangovers the next morning, we decided to rent scooters and visit some sites around Vang Vieng, starting with an Organic Mulberry farm!!

I had no idea that this is how pineapples grow:

The farm had a goat farm that we decided to pay a quick visit to and accidentally stumbled upon an incredible surprise – a female goat (which is apparently called a “Doe”, which I always thought was a female deer… way to go, Sound of Music) giving birth… to twins!!!! We have hours of footage, between all of our cameras and phones, documenting the entire event, but since it was extremely graphic and not everyone’s cup of tea (we were all super into it, but we’re four pretty weird individuals), we decided not to post it to the blog. If you would like to see the live birth, just send us a message in the “Contact Us” section and we’ll shoot it on over!! What we WILL share here is the aftermath of the birth – the adorable baby goats and a short video of them attempting to stand up at just 20 minutes old!!

After about an hour of standing and watching the goat birth and baby goats, we decided to move on, but not before eating some delicious goat cheese and drinking mulberry tea!

Rode on over to the famous Tham Phu Kham Cave and Blue Lagoon, which was pretty disappointing, but we took the opportunity to lay in the sun and enjoy some delicious coconuts, some of us enjoying them a little more than others:

Continued on to the less popular Silver Flower Cave, which was recommended to us by a dude from Colorado who was working at the mulberry farm. I think it is officially called Tham Khan Cave, but I can’t be sure. Anyway, the journey there was swell:

Now these caves were SPECTACULAR, both inside and out:

Hopped back on to our sexy scooters to prepare for our journey home:

During which we stumbled upon an even better surprise than the baby goats… BABY PIGS!!!!!!

The next day, we chose to partake in Vang Vieng’s long standing tradition of tubing on the Nam Song River while drinking copious amounts of alcohol and stopping at various bars along the way. There used to be 20 or so open bars along the river, but due to numerous deaths and accidents that occurred in recent years (mostly due to people being shit-heads), only 2 bars per day are allowed to be open. We didn’t let that factor deter us, however, and made our way down to the river to join dozens of other tourists for a full day of debauchery: