Tubing in Vang Vieng: farewell

Vang Vieng is a tiny riverside city in the poor country of Laos, with dirty roads and no tourist infrastructure whatsoever: no decent hospitals, fancy hotels, good restaurants or postcard landmarks (except for some nice caves). It sounds boring. It was, until in 2006 some backpackers had the idea of adventuring down the wild Nam Song river with a tube (tractor tyre inner tubes) and bars started to open along the riverside, as party pit-stops to those wanting to add a different kind of adventure. And then someone invented the famoues blue "tubing in Vang Vieng" t-shirt, an important object to be owned by any serious backpacker in Asia, and the whole thing skyrocked to become the party Mecca for backpackers in Southeast Asia, something very hard to achieve by any means.

Vang Vieng was poised to conquer the world as the best place of all to party. Except for one little problem, the lack of infrastructure. Imagine hundreds of backpackers going down a wild river (full of rocks), many of them drunk or mentally affected by different kinds of psicotropics, with no supervision or assistance whatsoever. Well, something has to go wrong, right? And it did, but the issue is that Vang Vieng, as probably any other city in Laos, has no decent medical facilities, which means that if you get seriously injured you have to drive (on bumpy one-lane roads) to the north of Thailand to find an acceptable hospital, a long and torturing trip.

The mentally ill, excessively drunk / drugged or just depressed, could die or get seriously injured by crashing into a rock, by playing on the "Death Slide" (a ceramic slide) or the rope swing, also nicknamed the "Death Swing". With so many death-somethings in Vang Vieng, it was no surprise to me when I recently read that the party was banned at the mythical city and it has now returned to its pre-2006 status. That change was certainly motivated by the more than 20 deaths in 2011 and 7 in 2012.

Too bad, what I saw in Vang Vieng, only 2 months before it was banned, was something unique and magical. There was a lot of freedom over there and I guess this is where the true problem lies. Some people just don't have enough responsibility to enjoy full play. Me and my friends had a blast, but we enjoyed within the safety limits that allowed us to leave the place in one piece, a minimum requirement for me to do anything. But the fact that they had to change a sign from "Don't jump" to "Don't jump or you will die", just proves that, unfortunately, some people were just not ready for Vang Vieng.

Picture: arriving at one of the many riverside
bars

Picture: the "Death Slide"

Romania's thugz mansion

Bucharest, the capital of Romania, became known to me after Steven Segall's "Born to Raise Hell" movie. Before that, I very often confused the name with Budapest, the capital of Hungary. My sincerest apologies to all Romanians. Anyway, I decided to visit the city during my tour around Europe, not only to see how the place was recovering after Segall's mission, but to see what they told me was the world's second largest government building, right after the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Ok, it seems right to me that the world's number one superpower built also the number one building in the world. But, with all due respect, why Romania built the second one? According to the IMF, the country's 2012 GDP of c.US$170 billion was ranked 56 in the world (GDP per capita of c.US$8,000), so it is fair to say that the country is not really there yet. So why did they want to build a €3 billion massive building while many Romanians struggle to make a living? Here is where the crazy leader comes in.

The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest is a 1,100 rooms and 340,000 m2 building designed and nearly completed by Nicolae Ceaușescu, a Romanian Communist politician, the leader of one of the most repressive and brutal regimes of the Soviet bloc (in office from 1969 to 1989). He loved himself so much, that during his leadership, the most important day in Romania was his birthday. The construction of the building started in 1984 (finished in the late 90's) and was intended to house political and administrative institutions, as well as to be Nicolae's personal humble home. Paradoxically, it was named the "People's House" by the very same man whose politics screwed the life of many of "his people".

Before visiting Bucharest and not knowing the above facts, I tought the building was something Romanian's were proud of, it looked like a hell of a postcard. I started to suspect there was something really wrong with that huge thing after I had to ask 10 different people to take a picture of me in front of it. Everybody seemed angry about it. After some research, I understood all that indignation. It didn't surprise me that Nicolae Ceaușescu starred the only violent overthrow of a communist government to occur during the revolutions of 1989.

The crazy leader is out, but still today that absurd construction is right in the center of Bucharest, remembering everyone of the country's painfull past and representing what many Romanians are still lacking, a house to call their own.

 Picture: someone finally agreed to take a picture of me
 in front of the Palace of the Parliament

                                     

Picture: the Palace of the Parliament's modest size