Peso Millionaires: Vang Vieng

It was hard to leave Luang Prabang, hard to leave its goodness, and hard to actually get out of there. For us it meant a 7 hour bus ride to Vang Vieng through long, windy hill-roads that left me wondering, “Why the hell am I torturing myself like this? Isn’t this supposed to be a vacation?” Right then and there I made a rule: no more bus rides. But as I type this I am sitting on yet another bus, so my rule was short-lived, but only due to impossibility of follow-through. If there had been an airplane out of Vang Vieng, I would have been on it. And you may be thinking, “Wifi on a bus? That doesn’t sound so bad.” But you see, you’re wrong. I’m typing this on Word, on our tiny new laptop, that I’m worried is going to malfunction due to the fact that it is sitting in the pool of sweat that is my lap, because this “air-conditioned,” “VIP bus” must have been made for some VIP masochists.

misery.

But I'm going to stop complaining because there are some really whiny college girls on this bus, they were even whimpering earlier, and I kind of wanted to smack them, and their pouty little faces…. which brings me to my next point: youth.

Brad and I were probably the oldest people in town last night. Vang Vieng is known as a party town, since the thing to do there is take a tube down the bar-lined river. We thought that sounded like great fun, but so apparently, did a hundred or so college kids. We were like, whatever, we’re hip! We’re young! We’re happening! But that died in us just a few minutes after getting into town, when a young, and slightly stoned Israeli traveler rubbed his eyes and asked, “How old are you guys?”

“27.”

“Whoa.”

The lesson was made clear again the next day, when we showed up at the river at 10 am. Considering we’d already been up 3 hours, we thought that was a perfectly reasonable time to show up and start the party. But all of our college friends were still asleep. We’d been excited to witness all the fun, the idiocy that goes along with giving some kids a tube and a lot of liquor, but there we were. All by ourselves. That’s when the idea was born: If we wanted to see some idiots, we’d have to be the idiots we wanted to see (didn’t Gandhi say something like that?).
We decided to call it: Dbag Day.

our dbag faces

Dbag is short for douche bag. And generally, I’d refrain from using such a crass term, but sometimes, no other word suffices. There are many types of dbags: read a thorough description here, but in general a dbag can be defined like this:

douche-bag: a person who habitually acts like an idiot, and thinks it's cool.

Acting like a dbag isn’t hard. If you’ve seen even 30 seconds of Jersey Shore, or almost any other reality TV show, then you’re good to go.

The first time down the river, we were the only two idiots on it. Actually, there was another, but we never found number one. The first time down the river we got caught doing non-dbag things, like slathering on sunscreen, drinking water, and enjoying the scenery. But since we started round one so early, we got to the start of the trip for round two in just enough time to meet up with all the other, enthusiastic celebrators of Dbag Day.

Dbags love hand signals