As the sun slowly sets behind the jagged peaks of Mount Nam Xay, a group of brightly colored hot air balloons float over the Vang Vieng Valley.

In the river below, young tourists laugh and splash each other from their kayaks.

It’s not hard to see what draws so many travelers here to this small town in central Laos. The scenery is breathtaking, the fun cheap and plentiful.

But the city is at the center of an international scandal after six tourists died last week from suspected methanol poisoning.

It is believed that their alcoholic drinks may contain methanol, an industrial chemical often used in illegal alcohol.

For the large numbers of young Western travelers on the backpacker route in Southeast Asia, Vang Vieng has become famous for what is called ‘tubing’. One described it to me as a pub crawl on the water.

Groups of friends in swimsuits and bikinis climb aboard huge inner tubes that would normally be used on trucks and float downstream, occasionally stopping at riverside bars where vodka shots are liberally administered, before diving back into the water .

By the time they reach Vang Vieng, everyone is quite cheerful.

“I think we’re going to miss the snakes,” two 27-year-old women from Hertfordshire, Great Britain, told me (they declined to give their names).

“The vodka shots are part of the package, but no one wants to drink the local vodka right now.”

The pair arrived here from Vietnam just as news of the deaths from methanol poisoning was spreading around the world.

“In Vietnam we got free drinks, especially if you play a game in the evening,” says one of them. “And we just never thought about it, you just assume that what they give you is safe. We’ve had buckets of drinks before, but we’re not going to take the risk again, and a lot of people here feel the same way.”

“Buckets” are exactly what they sound like: small plastic buckets filled with cheap vodka and other spirits. Groups of friends share the mixture through long plastic straws.

“Now that this has happened, you really have to think about it,” says the woman’s friend. “You wonder why the drinks are free? At the hostel involved in the deaths, we heard that they were handing out free vodka and whiskey shots for an hour every night. I think if that happened in Britain you would definitely think it was unreliable.”

Both women said they now stick to drinking beer from bottles or cans.

The deaths of six tourists have sent shockwaves through the backpacking world. Young female travelers feel the most vulnerable. The dead include Brit Simone White28, two young Australians, Holly Bowles and her best friend Bianca Jones, and two young Danish womenAnne-Sofie Orkild Coyman and Freja Vennervald Sorensen.

Only one of the dead, a 57-year-old American, James Louis Hutson, was a man. In the traveler chat groups, many have wondered whether only women’s drinks were spiked with methanol. The truth is, it’s still a mystery.

What we do know is that all victims stayed in the same place, the Nana Backpackers hostel. It has now been confirmed that the American victim was found dead in his bedroom on November 13. That same morning, the two Danish victims were found unconscious in their rooms and rushed to the local hospital.

Today the Nana hostel is closed, the swimming pool where pool parties were held until a few days ago is empty. A short walk along the river, a bar called “JaiDees” was also robbed. The owners of both have strongly denied that illegal or home-made alcohol was served.

On the river, there are few signs that the poisonings are stopping people from coming to Vang Vieng. The end of November is the high season for tourists. The rainy season is over, the sky is clear and the temperature is relatively cool: 28 degrees Celsius.

Along the main road, hostel owners told me they are fully booked. Young travelers from Europe and Australia are actually the minority. By far the largest groups come from neighboring Thailand and China, with the latter commuting south on the newly completed Chinese-built high-speed rail line in Laos.

Vang Vieng is still a dusty rural town. But it’s booming. Local entrepreneurs glide by in large black land cruisers and range rovers. As I walked back to my hotel on Saturday evening, I was surprised by the loud barking from the exhaust pipes of a Lamborghini driving down Vang Vieng’s only main street.

Twenty years ago this was a sleepy town surrounded by rice fields. Now it is being transformed by Thai and Chinese money. Beautiful new hotels are popping up with riverside cocktail bars and infinity pools.

But the young Western backpackers are not here for the five-star experience, they come for the friendly anything-goes atmosphere.

At a local motorcycle rental I meet two recent graduates from the University of Sussex.

Ned from Somerset says he has no intention of canceling plans because of what happened. “People are certainly scared,” he says, “but I don’t get the impression that anyone is leaving. Everyone is still having a good time here.”

He adds: “But everyone is also saying the same thing: don’t drink liquor, so people are being careful. There’s definitely that feeling in the air, but I think it’s actually quite safe now because all the bars are on edge. No one wants to to prison”.

His friend Jack is equally calm. “We came here to meet some friends and have some fun, and we’re still going to do that,” he says. “I’ve been here for a week now and I can tell you that the people here are absolutely some of the nicest people we’ve met in all of Southeast Asia. So whatever happened, I don’t think there’s anything malicious about it.”

Malicious or not, six people are dead, including five young women.

The shockwaves of what happened here have spread across the world to suburban homes from London to Melbourne, where concerned parents with children on the backpacker route are frantically messaging them, checking their whereabouts and trying to convince them not to go to Vang Vieng to go. .