Rafter No. 99

VANG VIENG, Laos - Life is an adventure; a sneaky adventure that can lull someone living it into a false sense of security, make them forget that danger can inhabit the smallest, unnoticeable places. Take, for example, the passenger-side back wheel of an aging túk-túk.

Vang Vieng is one of those places that is famous among certain set: backpackers, mostly people under the age of 30 who have spent time in Southeast Asia. Not everyone makes over here to Laos on their holiday, but everyone encounters at least one person who did and they hear at length about this riverside town and its tubing.

Laos is trying to develop responsible tourism, so the tubing is controlled by a community development board. The Lonely Planet describes this as a "cartel," which I think is a bit harsh when describing a bunch of middle-aged women who suffered through the Second Indochinese War. They charge $4 a trip, and that includes a ride up to the starting point, a tube, and a life jacket for the safety-conscious.

Our túk-túk -- basically a motorcycle which two benches and a cage built on the back -- held seven people: Katy, Zach, myself, a Kiwi-Australian couple on an around the world trip, and two British women. Two other people in the British party stood on the bar at the back of the túk-túk.

The Kiwi in the couple was Veronica, the Australian Chris. They sold the house (in New Zealand), flew to Europe and went east. In Armistar, where I watched the incredible lowering of the flags ceremony on the Indian-Pakistani border, they walked through the border during the actual event. They went to the Tribal Areas in Northwest Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is probably hiding. These are some of the most dangerous places on the planet.

And then we spun. I heard a crunch sounding and then túk-túk started to veer and wobble. We went to the left for a fraction of a second, then the driver made a hard turn to the right. It seemed as if we would tip over first on the driver's side, then on the passenger side. Adrenaline made time slow down, enough for me to grab tightly onto the handrail at the top of the túk-túk. I clamped down and braced for impact.

We went off the road, off the sidewalk and right towards a small Laotian restaurant. I imagined the plastic chairs and cheap wooden tables flying, careening through the corrugated tin walls and down into the river. But then we stopped. We hadn't tipped over.

The túk-túk's wheel, for no discernible reason, had fallen off. The rest of the vehicle looked fine, but the part without a wheel was buried in a couple inches of sand.

One person was hurt. One of the British men hanging off the back jumped off while the túk-túk was still on the road and now was limping toward the sidewalk. The side of his hand had a few cuts and it looked quite painful when he walked. We flagged down a túk-túk going back toward town, and he got on with his three friends.

Nervously, the rest of his went in another túk-túk up to the top of the river. Four dollars is a pretty good deal, but adventure travel comes with a bit of risk, too-often in this world of discount budget airlines and Skyping from Myanmar do we backpackers forget this.

But in this case, everything worked out. On the river, we ran into the British party, minus the man who'd fallen off the túk-túk. He was fine, they said, sipping Beer Laos back at the guesthouse. Resting, not riding.