LIFE AFTER DEATH IN VANG VIENG
Laos’ hedonistic hotspot pivots to ecotourism and discovers a new market in Asian and older foreign tourists
The roof rack on the songthaew was built for backpacks, but on this trip into town there was only one. The pink metallic roller bags and airline carry-on had to ride with the passengers. There’s simply no way to tie them down. The back of the converted pickup truck this day was a microcosm of what Vang Vieng has become. No longer Laos’ unbridled, gapyear party stop, this day it attracted a retired Australian couple, a middle-aged Canadian photographer, two South Koreans office women and a 21-year-old backpacker. She looked a bit thunderstruck at the company she was keeping.
“It’s a bit of a different crowd now,” says Joseph Foley, the 70-year-old owner of the Maylyn Guest House who claims to be the longest-serving expat in Vang Vieng. “Now we get a lot of older people, more mature.”
Four years ago, this taxi into town from Vang Vieng’s southern bus terminal would have been brimming with unwashed, braided-hair, shorts-and-tank-topped teens and 20-somethings. It would have made only one stop — at the main hostel in this central city 160 kilometres from Vientiane — and would not have been free.
Today, it stops on the main road just past the disused US-built runway that slices this Lao shanty town nearly in half. The Aussie couple departed for the town’s first “upscale” hotel, the Canuck, to a “flashpacker” guesthouse on the river, the Koreans to the waterfront boutique resort and the backpacker … well, the hostel is still there.
Welcome to the new Vang Vieng, a kinder, gentler version of one of Southeast Asia’s most infamous hotbeds of hedonism. Like a Hollywood starlet, this ramshackle blotch on a pictorial panorama of jagged mountains and the languid Nam Song River lived fast and died hard. It was knocked from its perch atop the list of must-do stops on the Banana Pancake Circuit nearly overnight.
Twenty-seven deaths of young Westerners in a year will do that.
A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT
Opium, weed, magic mushrooms, bootleg liquor, body paint, easy sex, bravado, freedom, laissez-faire regulation, corruption … to quote Norman Maclean, “eventually all things merge together, and a river runs through it”.
In this case, it is the Nam Song River, a meandering estuary that carves a watery route through the karst rock formations that rim the hunter green countryside. Just before the turn of the millennium, a farmer inadvertently made the river what it is today when, to give his farmhands a break, he tossed a few tractor tyres into the back of a pickup and offered the weary a leisurely float down the river.
Tubing was born. And Vang Vieng was never the same.
By 2001, tubing had become an industry. Rickety bars opened on the river banks and proprietors strung up crude ziplines and water slides and let anyone try their luck for free. Owners cranked up the music, hired foreigners illegally to pass out shots to tubers floating by and mixed up shakes and drinks laced with opium and mushrooms.
Vang Vieng may have been founded in 1383, but it was tubing that put it on the map.
“To see Vang Vieng metamorphose into this thing where backpackers didn’t even know they were in Laos really was sad,” says Stuart McDonald, founder of travel website Travelfish. “The place is a destination that makes itself. Why do you need a party to make people come?”
But come they did, as many as 150,000 backpackers a year. Not all of them left alive.
Dozens — perhaps hundreds — of young Brits, Aussies and Swedes cracked their skulls diving into rocks, overdosed, drowned or poisoned themselves on buckets of Lao Lao grain alcohol brewed in the back of the bars and served up in cheap buckets to tourists from 2004-12.
THE WALKING DEAD
Locals began calling the hordes of drunk youngsters “the zombies”. They would stagger back from the riverbank and bars bandaged, bleeding and drunk from their misadventures. Clothing was optional, with the guys bare-chested and the girls only covering what modesty required.
It mortally offended the conservative
locals. And those who once bathed, washed and fished in the Nam Song forsook it, convinced it now was haunted with the ghosts of the many dead kids.
That didn’t mean they stopped taking their money, however.
More than 1,500 households at one point were invested in a cooperative to buy and rent out tubes. Much like Pattaya’s bright lights draw men and women from poorest Isan, the lure of good-paying jobs drew impoverished Lao farmers to work in the bars, hostels and restaurants. It was a classic Catch-22: the natives hated everything Vang Vieng had become but were too dependent on it to change things.
The communist government ended up doing it for them.
In 2011, tiny Vang Vieng hospital reported 27 foreigner deaths, most of them under the age of 25. Doctors reckon there were many more, as patients with anything as serious as a broken bone were transferred to Vientiane.
After a 26-year-old Aussie died on a zipline, his mum launched a campaign to bring regulation to Vang Vieng’s watersports industry. When two more Australians died that year, the country’s 60 Minutes news programme ran an expose called “Death in Paradise” in March 2012.
Foreign pressure came to a head at an international summit that summer. Within hours after the meeting’s close in August, the hammer came down on Vang Vieng.
“The prime minister called a meeting and he said, ‘We have a big problem because of all you greedy people, so we’re shutting you down’,” said innkeeper Mr Foley, whose wife attended the session. “But all that really happened was, for once, they enforced the law.”
Overnight, 24 riverside venues were shut down and eventually torn down for violating existing regulations, operating without licences and serving unsafe drinks to