The Joy of Tubing

Tubing, or floating down a river in a tractor inner tube, is what brought us to Vang Vieng, Laos, where the locals have made a kind of lethal artform out of it.

The deal is this.

You hire your inner tube, put your faith and your cash in a Lao drybag then pile into a tuktuk for the Nam Song river a few kilometres out of town.

Thence you laze downstream, past riverside bars equipped with attractions from slides to rope swings, zip wires, mud wrestling and slingshots, through the odd set of rapids, then down past tranquil scenes of wallowing water buffalo back to town.

Where the lethality comes in, obviously, is the attractions. Oh, and the way they combine with stimulants, I guess.

The near-total absence of any concept of health and safety in Laos is initially quite refreshing. It keeps you on your toes. As amply demonstrated by the rope swings.

They look remarkably innocuous in their resting state, dangling calmly fifteen feet or so above the surface of the river — depth best confirmed before you take the, ahem, plunge.

But they are powered by bungee cords, which transform them into sheer terrifying insanity once you leave the platform. And it is the 30-foot platform you go from. Not its friendly, half-size sibling.

A firm believer in conquering vertigo through sheer terror, I tried one of these at or first stop. More through peer pressure than anything else.

I am camped on the 15-foot platform, having realised I need to ascend a further 15 feet, and contemplating climbing back down, when a gorgeous Canadian chick ambles up.

“It’s not so bad,” she says. “It’s fine. I’ll show you how.”

“I’m really not sure about this,” I say.

“You’ll be fine,” she says. “You’ve got big arms… You’ve clearly got good upper-body strength.”

She leaps. Pulls a few elegant trapeze-style manoeuvres. Exits feet-first from a suitable height. Z watches admiringly.

Screw it, I think. I’ll do it.

With my obvious “upper body strength” giving me a good 25 kilos on Victoria, the pendulum effect of the bungee cord kicks in something horrid, swinging me way, way higher than that 30-foot platform at a speed too rapid to achieve a controlled exit.

I adopt the rictus grin which is my default facial expression in such circumstances.

Cling on, if not for dear life, at least for “dear undislocated wrists” (a common rope swing injury). Pendulum to-and-fro until I am at a sensible enough height a) to start enjoying it b) to be confident I’m not going to break anything and c) to enter the water at a point and in a fashion of my choosing.

Let go. Enter feet first. Hit sand bottom, gently. Arise, slightly shellshocked and wishing I’d held my nose, to see Z scrambling up to the top tier (from which, it has to be said, some rather older Lao kids have been swinging before us).

“Z!” I yell. “No!!!! You can’t go up there.”

He turns, a jovial beam on his face, as the teenager on the platform reels in the bungee cord for him with no qualms at all. “Why not, Mum? It’s fun!”

“You don’t have the upper-body strength,” I say. “You need to be able to support your entire bodyweight plus the pendulum effect as it swings back and forward, otherwise you’ll hit the water from 30 feet.”

“Please, Mum,” he says.

“No,” I say. “It’s really not a good idea. You could dislocate your shoulder.”

He sits on the ladder and ponders. “Mmmm,” he says. “I suppose my lifejacket does have crotch straps, after all. And that is going to hurt.”

Like I say, you need to be permanently on the qui vive. Even with the slides. Z spent a good couple of hours whizzing down the wooden one, which dumps you into the river from the relatively approachable height of ten feet or so:

At the next bar the slide is made of cement, plastered with ceramic tiles, with a vertical drop of about thirty feet, topped off by a ten-foot lipped ramp which one exits at an angle to hit the water from about fifteen feet up.

With our new Australian friends, I persuade Z to do his own risk assessment on this item. He decides to pass.

Local lore has it that this is where one of the people who died last year — people die every year in Vang Vieng, thanks to the combination of happy pizzas, happy brownies, endless bongs, free shots, rapids and dangerous slides — broke her neck, and I find it infinitely easy to believe.

One of the downsides of health and safety culture is that we throw our kids out into the big, bad, adult world with no understanding that something could, actually, be as dangerous as it looks, or, perhaps more precisely, no understanding of the need to look for danger at all.

Apparently, two British travellers died on this stretch a month or so ago. In the dry season.

Not going off the rope swings into shallow water. Not venturing onto cement slides. But by tubing down the river without being able to swim, without life-jackets, and with who knows what chemical enhancements.

I’d wondered why the guys who rented out the tubes asked if I could swim. And, now, it seems, I know. Until these people drowned it probably hadn’t occurred to them to ask.

It’s truly tragic. In the Chekhovian sense. Kids with their lives cut short. Bereaved parents, who will never recover. And utterly, utterly pointless.

How to combat this? You either make the whole world safer — and thus infinitely less interesting — or you increase the risk at home. I know which side of the debate I sit on. But, my god, those poor kids. And their parents.

At the Last Bar, which thoroughly deserves its name, Z gets some hands-on drugs education (“Mum! Is *that* a bong or a pipe?”) before we abandon our friends to their tubes and a buzz unbroken by questions from young people, and take a longtail back for the last set of rapids outside town. It certainly vaut le voyage from Vientiane.