#10 vangvieng

The Lonely Planet guide to Laos made the town of Vangvieng sound like a backpacker-ridden den of filth, filled with gaudy bars blaring non-stop episodes of Friends, but for the most part we were blissfully unaware of that side of things as we stayed at the tranquil Phoudindaeng Organic Farm some 3km north of town. The farm is a blessed anomaly in a country that favours slash and burn farming to quickly clear the land for new crops, and where eco-friendly practices are virtually unheard of. So it's an impressive feat for the Laotian owner, known as "Mr T" (thankfully, no resemblance to the other Mr T). He spent most of his life working in an office job, then in his fifties he dropped a bombshell on his family and friends by deciding to give up his cushy, well-paid office job to pursue his dream of establishing an eco farm. So he moved back to his hometown of Vangvieng to set up the farm, picking up the basics of sustainable farming along the way. Half a decade or so later, he now runs a successful organic mulberry farm, a guest house, a restaurant, plus he has set up a community centre where local children learn English for free. And the really canny thing is, he's arranged it all so that much of the work around the farm is done by travel-weary foreigners hankering for an honest day's work on the land - and they all work for free! Just brilliant, I tell you! Kris and I started our stay by feeding milk to the baby goats (cute and scarily ravenous at the same time), then followed it with a day of shovelling dirt under the hot sun to build a terrace for the restaurant, and finally topping it off by helping the children learn English in the after-school classes. And it was just the right amount of solid work to satisfy our travel-slackened bodies and minds (three-and-a-half weeks into the trip, and counting).
The funny thing is, for all his amazing achievements, Mr T never really looked happy - he always seemed to have this anxious, preoccupied expression (the only time he cracked a smile at us was when we were leaving... hmm). So it seems that although he's living the dream, the dream is just not worth living. (And so let's all just give up, right now.)
Vangvieng is not a place short of natural wonders: as well as the surrounding karst limestone mountains (what the hell does "karst" mean, anyway? I've read it in three different places in the Lonely Planet now), there's dozens of spooky caves to explore (I had an unfortunate experience in one cave where I was busting to go to the loo and had to go near an old statue of Buddha - how blasphemous), glittering lagoons to swim in and of course tubing (floating on inflatable tyres) on the Nam Song river. We saved our tubing trip for our last day in Vangvieng, and we teamed up with a Kiwi couple, Sam and Poppy, and set off on the 3-hour sojourn down the slow-moving river, stopping to get longnecks of beer at the riverfront bars along the way, gazing at booze-addled backpackers who launched themselves off cable rope swings and were hurtled from dizzying heights into the river. A five-and-a-half-hour paddling marathon later, we all finally made it back to the tubing depot, sopping and sated (not meant to sound so dirty, but so be it).
Another oddity in Vangvieng was the Communist presence - and not just there in the hammer and sickle flags that were flying high. A couple of tourists staying at the farm discovered that there was a curfew in town each night, when they were riding towards town at around midnight each night and were stopped by a truck full of angry-looking soldiers wielding machine guns who told them that everything in town was shut and that they had to go back to the farm. Who were they to argue?