Day 81! Today was a nice and relaxing day which was really needed after a long night out! Also… I have a gross, yet funny story to share at the end of this post. It’s from yesterday and I forgot to mention it in the last post, enjoy!

It was a very slow morning today. I woke up at 8:30am after a late night out with my friends and headed down to my free hotel breakfast!

Even though it’s not a huge meal, it’s really nice that it’s free! Especially because the hotel dorm is only $4 a night.

I then went and tried to nap… which I was surprisingly unsuccessful. So I went and took a shower and felt alive and ready to take on the day!

Maddie, Jenny, and I planned to join one of the hostel’s Tipsy Tubing activities for the day! So we headed over to pay and sign up. The tubing was 150,000 Kip, which felt a little steep for what we got, but I was excited nonetheless to relax on a river for a number of hours!

We then got lunch at one of the same restaurants we ate at yesterday! Fried rice sounded amazing and it lived up to my expectations!

After my meal I enjoyed a coconut shake and the owner brought us a few bananas as well! Bananas in SE Asia are very good and I probably enjoy them even more than in the US.

We headed back to the hotel to get ready for tubing and set out for a very fun and relaxing afternoon!

They told us the shuttle would pick us up at 1pm but it unfortunately didn’t come till closer to 2pm! But eventually we piled onto a van and set out for some tubing!

The tubing ended up being a blast! A lot of the people I met the day and night before were participating so I got to chat with them even more! Also everyone was in great spirits as the weather was phenomenal.

The journey included three stops. The first was at a bar on the river where we listened to early 2000s pop songs and danced to the Macarena and the Cha Cha Slide. The second stop was a bar a little off the river but it had a volleyball net where I joined strangers in a relaxed and goofy pickup game!

The first two stops were around 30 min apart… but the last stop was 2.5 hours later. So we hopped back on our tubes and set sail! During these two hours I dove into deep conversations with new and old faces. We also had to face small rapids and avoid rocks and trees poking out of the river!

I didn’t actually do the drinking part of tipsy tubing, so it was just tubing for me. But it ended up being a perfect way to spend the afternoon!

We even got to see some amazing views of the mountains, sunsets and the hot air balloons! It was a very magical site and was really jaw dropping!

We had to walk back to the hotel which ended up taking 20-30 minutes, but it was nice to stretch the legs after lying down for so long. I then showered and joined Maddie and Jenny at a soup restaurant and had a mouth watering-ly good bowl of wanton noodle soup with duck!

For only 35,000 Kip, this has to be one of the best soups I’ve had so far! The broth was delicious and not too salty. The wantons and the noodles were making me crave more and I slurped up every last drop of my bowl.

I then headed back to my dorm to rest up for a bit before meeting back up with friends for another night on the town!

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Okay, I promised a story… and just be warned, it’s a little gross.

I forgot to mention in my post yesterday, probably because I wanted to block out this crappy memory (pun intended). I was using the restroom after a brief bout of Laos Belly and as I stood up I could feel my phone shift in my pocket and I watched it in slow motion as it tumbled into the toilet bowl… with split second decision making I instantly pulled it out and rinsed and cleaned it off. But it was such a bummer and an unfortunate accident. Luckily my phone is fine and it doesn’t smell (yes, one of my friends was bold enough to smell it for me later in the day)… so yeah! Hope that never happens again haha!

See you tomorrow!

– Elie