Ooh La La: Vieng Viang

Welcome to Viang Vieng, the town suddenly brought forth into a modern world by an influx of backpackers. Its honestly pretty disgusting. To find a place for dinner we simply spent ten minutes trying to find a place that wasn't playing Friends or some other American Television show overly loud, which led us too...

The Ooh La La Cafe, owned by the tiny yet energetic and friendly Hula, the owner of the place who used to work at one of the bigger bars. He suddenly became our best friend. Earlier that day we also met another San Fransiscan named Dan (shout-out) who has been hanging out with us for the last few days.

One thing leads to another among friendly and adventurous people and suddenly I find myself the next day gripping Hula from behind on his motorbike heading out to the annual "Rocket Festival" in Ban Phatang [N19deg04'22.7" E102deg25'47.9"], a TINY village 12 km north of Viang Vieng. Taylor and Dan are on another rented motorbike. Two pairs of aussies are also part of the caravan as we travel through beautiful countryside, with the weather changing every 5 minutes.


And suddenly we're at the Rocket Festival! Hula takes us for a walk down the road to a place where we imbibe Beer Lao, pictured here:

meanwhile, in the background there is a sense of foreboding excitement as temporary bamboo structures are being erected to launch the rockets from.

As we're finishing up our Beer Lao, the sound of chanting comes down the street, and our group is greeted by the friendliest people I've met on the trip yet.



Holy hotcakes batman! These Laotions are suffering from some sort of horrible skin condition, in addition to their drunken revelry. Well, that's actually wrong. They are covered in, what I think, is axle grease, a flame retardent for the operators who will actually be climbing up and lighting the giant rockets off. It actually reminds me alot of the gentian tradition back at Queen's. You decide:


After some friendly touching, we were all covered in axle grease too, and the parade to the rocket launching/party site began.There was chanting, random instruments, offers of lao low whisky. You really should have been there.

Here's a good picture of our group. Hula is the Laotian guy (obviously) on the left.

Here's a picture of Dan.

And here's a video!

Alot of the party itself defies description. There were about 10 white people there, and at least 400 Lao. There was live music in Lao, a dance floor for about 100 in the open air, Beer Lao all over the place, and rockets going off once a minute.


Let me explain a little bit about these rockets. They are cylinders about one foot and a half long, and two inches in diameter. They are tied to the top of eight foot bamboo poles, which act as launching support, which means a way of holding them safely away from yourself. Tied to the rockets themselves are tiny flowers, but I'm not sure why.

They are rockets, not fireworks, so they just shoot straight up. Actually, they are supposed to shoot straight up, but this never seemed to happen. Usually they'd corkscrew off into the jungle somewhere, and, a few times, even explode right on the launch pad. Its amazing the fun you can have when no one cares about safety standards!



Several BeerLao later (remember these are big bottles, so "several" really means "fourteen") I found myself and some of the other white folk on the dance floor. Laotian freestyle dancing goes very well with the rest of the Laotian lifestyle, meaning it requires very little effort and looks like it. It involved holding your hands out front of yourself, limply, and shifting from foot to foot. I am not exagerating this at all. If you feel creative, swivel your wrists - but for the love of god don't exert yourself. I found it pretty easy then to impress the four Laotian grandmothers I ended up dancing with. I would have whipped out the lawnmower or shopping cart, but I think that would have shocked everyone at the party; I was also thinking that would take too much effort.

Finally, it was time for us to go back to our world. We stopped 3 km north of Viang Vieng at one of the stops along the tubing route. It was a bit of a shock, because we went back to 98% white people.

I'm getting lazy, since this is a long post, so I'll just say that there was a 30 foot tall swing over the water. I followed the simple procedure.

1. Climb swing
2. Swing into water
3. Swim to Shore
4. GOTO 1

Here is Taylor performing #2:

This happened several times, and then we headed back. Our day was over.

Today, we went to a Cave south of Viang Vieng called Tham Chang [N18deg54'34.0" E102deg26'32.3"]. Here is me swimming in some cavewater:

Unfortunately, even though it is "the thing" in Viang Vieng, I'll probably miss out on tubing this time around. We're off to Vientaine tommorow.

Maybe next time.