Muddin'

The best part about Vang Vieng is getting out of town, away from the bars serving happy shakes and showing "Friends" reruns, the drunk kids coming back from tubing, the stores selling all the same Lao souvenirs. When the weather clears you get an idea of why people started coming to Vang Vieng in the first place. Tucked along the river, the town is nestled in the middle of a striking karst landscape: peaks that rear up suddenly from the valley floor, covered in deep green forest and riddled with caves. The muddy river that conveys inner tubes down the river and past bars is fed by streams that drip through limestone caverns and carve honeycombs of chambers in the mountains.

It wasn't raining when we rented our mountain bikes but it didn't take long to start. My friend Morgan, a French gentleman, and I were determined to leave the party kids behind and explore the surrounding area, regardless of the weather. We didn't see much for the first hour as the clouds hung low over the rice fields, but we were concentrating so hard on dodging the rocks and puddles that we hardly looked up anyway. The puddles were the trickiest part: you were never quite sure how deep they were until you were in the middle of one.

At one particularly soupy patch my front tire got horrifically bogged down, skittering out from under me. I put a foot down to catch myself, the only problem being the ankle-deep mud didn't offer much traction. Shloop! My foot flew out from underneath me and suddenly I found myself in a full butt-plant in the middle of the huge mud puddle. Tangled in the bike, floundering in the muck, I was laughing too hard to get myself upright and Morgan was too surprised to be of any help. Luckily there was a creek right there where I plopped myself down to rinse off the dirt. Not that it did much good - within ten minutes I was covered again from the spray off the wheel, my pants, shirt and face splattered like a Pollock painting. Vermont, your mud season ain't got nothin' on Laos.