Word: vang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When he first got to Vang Viang, in central Laos?about six hours by plodding diesel bus from Vientiane?it had taken four pipes for Fitz to get high. Seven, and he would begin to drift into his own subconscious, as though he were the director of his own pipe dreams. He had come via Thailand from Toronto, where he had been laid off from an Internet magazine. Now, after a month in town, it took a dozen pipes to get to that blissful nodding state, and if he didn't come down to see the dragon at least once...
...word means bamboo in Lao and is indicative of what the country has come to represent to many of the youthful, Western travelers who have made this Indo-Chinese nation of 5 million a haven for narco-tourists seeking the Asian high life. At any given moment in Vang Viang, a town of about 20,000, at least 50 foreigners are here mainly to partake of the opium scene, and another 100 stick around because potent, green, budded marijuana sells for $1 an ounce. (Both drugs are illegal in Laos, though the laws are loosely enforced.) Since opening...
...increasingly they are drawn because they have heard, from other kids on the Asian travel circuit, that drugs in Laos are plentiful and cheap, and as long as you don't do anything too stupid, the cops leave you alone to get loaded in peace. Towns such as Vang Viang and Muang Sing, in the north, have developed expat communities of late teens and twentysomethings who come intending to stay a day or two but then find they are unable to leave. What keeps them in Vang Viang? For some, it is an idyllic landscape with jagged limestone karsts towering...