In the tubing, Vang Vieng Laos

The town of Vang Vieng Laos has a toursim industry built almost solely on Tubing, which is to float down the Mekong river getting wasted. There is a lot more to Vang Vieng than just the tubing, a beautuiful landscape with plenty of explorable caves, mountains to trek, a few temples and the clear flowing Mekong running right through the town. All these attractions seem to take a back seat to the tubing though, and even the caves and natural landscapes all have an entrance fee and someone selling beer and food at the entrance.

Throughout our trip we have seen people all over Thailand wearing wife beaters and neon shorts saying "in the tubing vang vieng laos". We saw tons of them, usually a few a day. We had a lot of people either tell us to go to laos to tube, or when they found out we were going, asked if we went just to tube. People travel for hours and hours in buses just to go tubing. Now, this may sound like a good deal for the town, there's a lot of money in drunks, and for some it really is a decent way to make a living. The problem is that there is people everywhere acting like fools, and the town needs room to accommodate them, with sketchyily built bars and medeterrian style hotels popping up like weeds they are doing a good job keeping up.They even have a array of bars called "tv bars" where they play either friends of family guy to entertain hungover zombies as they eat "I'll be there for youuuuuu..." Plenty of tourists die every year by drowning (it was hard to get a concrete number but the recurring stat seemed to be one a week) while supremely messed up on a combination of the "happy shakes and pizzas" conataining a potent combination  of marijuana, magic mushrooms, opium, exctasy and who knows what else, maybe an opium joint just to be safe, all of which are available at an array of restaurants with copious amounts of cheap booze. Or they crash their scooter. As you can imagine all these people create a huge amount of waste, plastic bottles are the biggest cuplrite, though the town has honestly done a good job keeping itself clean. The other big issue is the noise polltuion, the bars in Vang Vieng play shitty club music, and they play it loud. The few bars right at the beginning of the tubing are the worst, and they also happen to be right beside The Organic Farm. This ruins what used to and should be a quiet and serene atmosphere just outside the city. The bars also have a passion for slides, rope swings, diving platforms and the like which I'm sure people must hurt themsleves on regularily. All this negative press almsot stopped us from going, alsmost. We figured we were there, and it'd be a shame to not experience it. With a large amount of guilt we set off with the other volunteers from the farm to float down the river. 

Like any good tubing experience we got more than we baragained for, our plan was to skip most of the bars and float right to the end of the line. It didn't happen, we ended up stopping multiple times, playing a few games of beer pong, sliding down a huge slide, and fooling around. As it got darker and colder we began to fear for our lives, Kelly's tube was flat, we were sobering up and there was still a few more kilometres to go. Luckily the tuktuk drivers plan ahead and have a pick up point right where we needed it. We hoped in thinking of warm food and dry clothes. Overall, we did end up having a great time (blush). 

The First Garden

A couple days after we planted the seeds David & Meira joined us for our final week at SaeLao. David is one of Luc's sisters best friends, and Meira is his lovely girlfriend.  It was great to see a familiar face and spend New Years Eve together. Side note, having a master chef on hand is always a good idea, David whipped up a baked sweet potato and goat cheese dish in the wood fired oven that was super delicious, and baked some very tasty loaves of bread for us all. Mmmm. They also brought something very interesting to our attention, we'd planted seeds to sprout, but had no garden to put them in. With their help and expertise we started to dig up a garden. 

Runner bean sprout, these little guys grew so fast! from seed to this three days.

Ginger made plastic bag covers for all the labels, hopefully it lasts. They really looked cute.

This was after five days, told you they grow fast! To the left is Chinese cabbage, the tall ones in the back are sunflowers.

The spot we decided to put the garden got good sunlight and was in a nice spot, but it had a few tree stumps in it. Those were a little stubborn. 

David using the "peanut planter" to break the ground, which is cement like clay, making this task a whole lot harder than it looks. Meira watches in fear he may lose a toe. 

Collecting cow patties from the road to help fertilize the soil. We filled that wheelbarrow in fifteen minutes.

Ginger pulling out some of the last remaining bits of grass. The rock border was shaped like Manitoba if you looked from the other side. Although it looked nice, it was very heavy to haul the rocks over.

Once we broke up the ground and mixed in some manure and better soil, we started to transplant the sprouts. This lucky zucchini was the first to be put in his new home.

The last sprout getting put in the ground. It's hard to see, but the perimeter of the garden is lined with 24 sun flowers. They should help keep the air and soil free of toxins. The front row is zucchini, and beside that are potatoes. The rest of the sprouts will find a home soon. Assuming a volunteer decides to do it anyway. 

More about our time at SaeLao and the Organic Farm to come...

What to say about the SaeLao Project ..

Our first experience with Voluntourism...

Ugh, this is stressful. Of all the experiences we've had travelling so far, Sae Lao has been without a doubt the most controversial, and the most conflicting. We arrived at Sae Lao expecting things like bio-gas, rocket stoves, a functioning garden, and organic produce. If you check out their website, you'll understand why .. http://saelaoproject.com/

Unfortunately, most of these things are more like visions or goals, and not really a current reality. We were joined by five other volunteers at the start, a German Valentine, a man of Brussels Robin, two lovely ladies of German & Austria Judith and Lisa, and Tudevee a tour guide from Mongolia. The group was fierce. Valentine and Robin were sass mouths and we fell in love with them instantly, there was no getting anything past either of these two and you were going to hear about it.

Robin, the soon apprenticing architect, speaker of the French language, and lover of food was the friend we had been looking for. And Valentine, the amazing rap artist? Was a man of too many mysteries to ever fully grasp. He would constantly wow us with his amazing ability to pick up language, climb mountains, teach English, get into culture, and tell it to people straight. He almost immediately acquired the nickname of 'the fearless leader' .. . and then at the end of three weeks with him we got a hold of his music. Qu'est que fuck?? It was really good.

This is the bungalow we called home for three weeks.

Laundry was done in the stream just across the road.

Laundry aftermath.

But more importantly, how did we spend our time? Well, a few afternoons we spent making mud - this is way harder than it sounds, to build mud brick walls to finish the community center, note the scaffolding.

Monday to Friday we spent an hour and a half teaching English in the community center to the local children of Nathong Village.

Ginger went to the primary school in Nathong a couple time to teach a real English class with grades 3 and 5.

We spent some time almost everyday swimming in the Blue Lagoon that was a mere 100 meters from our bungalow.

We were about 8km from town (Vang Vieng) but it felt like much further. Laos is covered in this dry red dust so the couple times we rode in, we got ridiculously 'done-up.'

There was always cats and ducks that needed to be cuddled and fed.

We learned very quickly that things in the kitchen needed a scrub down, and most things were almost non-operational, but still attempted to clean and cook as much as we could. Living without a kitchen for over two months had been a struggle, and we were eager to make whatever we had at our disposal work.

The tiny kitchen was only twice this size.

We started work on the peanut field only to discover that the "organic farm" was soaking their peanuts in GAS!? Yes, gasoline. We were in a bit of denial to begin with, and then we went through a stage of utter disgust, and then thankfully we had our 'fearless leader' to ask the right questions and say the key words, "hey man, gas on the peanuts is not organic" The situation had turned out to be a sort of cultural thing in that the lady that is sort of in charge of the peanut stuff soaks them in a little bit of gas to keep the ants from eating the plants. We think she thought we were a little crazy for thinking this was wrong but after talking to some people things have changed and now instead of gas there is a moat on trial for ant prevention.

But this ant thing was sort of like the cherry on the skeptics cupcake. What were we really doing here anyways? We knew why we had come here, to do some organic farming, teach some English, learn about some sustainable building methods, educate ourselves on the workings of biogas and rocket stoves, and plant a bit of roots for ourselves - both figuratively and literally. Were we doing these things, were these things going on at all?

Well, yes and no. Nothing is black and white right? And boy is Sae Lao just the fiercest shade of grey. We were teaching English, and loving it. We did some mud brick building, super cool, super hard. There was no functioning biogas, and call me a pessimist but I really don't think there ever will be, and the only rocket stove to be found was laying beside the shed looking like the red truck with three wheels that some kid got for Christmas and had since lost interest in it. The roots, well that sort of made the experience.

In a 24 hour period Valentine (far left) and Robin (middle) both left. And we realized that you don't make these types of friends by aimlessly backpacking through space. We made friends that will probably lure us to Germany and Brussels some day soon, which really is amazing. Not to mention we're hoping to meet up with Robin in Indonesia in the next couple months.

But what about the literal roots?? We had tried to plant peanuts but that turned out to be more of a bust than anything. Sae Lao was planting all their own rice which was more than an impressive feat, but it wasn't rice season. And where was the garden?? How was there seriously no garden and no fruit trees? So, Luc asked, "hey man, why aren't you growing any food?" you know, on this farm. And Sengkeo (the man running the joint) says oh seeds! just one second. and presents us with little white packets of seeds for runner beans, other beans, sunflowers, eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, Chinese cabbage, and lettuce. Hallelujah. Check back soon to see how our first experience with putting seeds in the ground came together.