Butts Stuck on Rocks, and Avoiding the Strong? Mushroom Bucket...

Well, it's difficult to know what to say about tubing when the title of this blog pretty much sums it up! And that was a deliberate typo after 'Strong'...let me explain...
   We started off on our tubing adventure pretty late in the day; the clouds didn't make for inviting river-floating weather. But as soon as the sun came out, we put on our swimsuits, I excitedly put on a thigh-length dress without feeling inappropriate or indecent (I was positively covered up compared to some girls...), and we set off for the river!
  Ignoring the complaints of one unhappy tuber- 'We only passed one bar, and we're NOT happy!' (get over it, love!)- we shared a tuk tuk with an American guy and two English girls. We ended up sharing our tubing experience with the latter lasses, Pippa and Helen; it was so nice to meet two people who were completely on our wavelength about travelling! We had a whale of a time tubing down the river with them; Helen and I tended to lag at the back, with our bottoms constantly getting stuck on the rocks! Our entry point to the river was pretty interesting; on one side, crazy Lao's on a makeshift zip-wire flinging themselves into the river (we did not attempt this- fair play to all my fellow travelers who did!), on the other side, a Lao group attempting to run across the river current (I somehow ended up in the middle of the group; they pushed me in the right direction!), up above stood a crowd of revelry hecklers, and then generally people getting wasted all around.
   A little way down, we stopped in a riverside bar, lured by the painted sign that promised '1 Bucket + Free Food!'. When we stumbled out of our rubber rings, we saw another crudely painted sign- 'Strong? Mushroom Bucket'. We were not tempted by this- it's not good news when the bar doesn't even know how strong it is!- four Beerlaos did the job very nicely, thank you! Or were they just advertising mushroom buckets to strong people? Who knows! Anyway, instead of doing the bar crawl thing, we just took the very chilled approach of just drinking in one bar. After many chats and laughs, and a quick toilet-visit through a garden full of cockerels(!), we plopped back into our rings and set off down the river once more. I was continuing with the afternoon's relaxed attitude, just cruising down the picturesque river at my own pace, luscious, misty mountains either side of me. However, just when I was getting into a faster current, I suddenly saw that Patrick and Pippa had banked on the left, when Helen and I were somewhere middle-right. Desperately paddling with my left hand only (the other hand was occupied with a Beerlao can), I eventually made it to the bank- though a couple of Lao guys had to help me out of my tube! Poor Helen, swept with the river's fast current, ended up falling into the river, consequently losing her flip-flops! No time to worry about that- it was 5.55p.m, and we had to return our tubes by 6p.m if we didn't want to lose 20,000 kip each! (To put it into perspective, that's about 1.50 pounds, $2.50 CAD, so probably wouldn't have been a big deal...but shush! It was crucial at the time!). After telling our tuk-tuk driver to step on it, we raced back towards town, and made it back to the shop by the skin of our teeth. You know us- always living life on the edge!
   So tubing in summary?...Well, I've already done that with the title. We're in Laos' capital at the moment, Vientiane, enjoying a litre of Beerlao- or three.. Tomorrow we're headed to another embassy to get a visa...this time, we'll make sure we have the right bloody name on the bloody cheque! Or expect to see blood shed...Off down south on Wednesday!