There were several ways I could have died while travelling through Laos - or at least, got into a decent amount of trouble.
There was the night I was frisked at gunpoint by authorities on the street and almost arrested for being out and about past the communist government's midnight curfew.
Or the day I took a hot air balloon ride with a pilot who didn't know how to land.
We eventually disembarked in a small village where 10 Laotian men tried unsuccessfully to hold the balloon down, before our pilot continued floating into a mountain range.
We never did find out what happened to him.
And then there was that day I went "tubing" - floating down the Nam Song River on an inner tube, stopping at bars along the way to drink booze by the bucketload - an incredibly fun, but nevertheless dangerous, pastime that claimed the lives of two fellow young Australians earlier this year.
Lee Hudswell, 26, from Sydney and 19-year-old Melburnian Daniel Eimutis, died in separate incidents while tubing in the backpacker hub of Vang Vieng.
A third Australian, 22-year-old Alexander Lee, also died in the small town this year. His body was found in his hotel room.
Their shocking deaths came just weeks after I had returned from my trip, having raved about how fun tubing was and how it had been the highlight of my month-long adventure through Southeast Asia.
Having said that, it was never a secret to any of us (me, and others on my tour) that tubing was risky business.
While our tour allowed a day in Vang Vieng for tubing - there's not much else to do there, except for lounging in a bar drinking sangria and watching re-runs of either Friends or Family Guy, guaranteed to be playing on a screen at any given bar - this day was considered free time, as our tour company was unwilling to bear the burden of the risks associated with it.
Our tour guide - who warned us several times that people regularly died on the river - was forbidden by the company from tubing, due to the risk of injury, or worse.
From around midday in Vang Vieng, hundreds of travellers from all over the world converge on the riverside bars.
Some get to bars on foot while others rent a tube and float along the river from bar to bar, amid stunning mountainous scenery.
Each bar has a person whose job it is to throw a rope into the water for revellers to grab onto, so they can be reeled in to the next party.
Once you're there, you're offered/forced to drink free shots of potent Lao whisky - the same whisky that almost killed Melbourne teenager Annika Morris, whose heart stopped several times after drinking it - and sometimes free food.
You can jump from podiums, swing from trapezes over the water or slip down water slides - all of which I avoided.
Inhibitions are completely lost as strangers drink from communal bottles of booze and buckets of ****tails, decorate each other with textas and spray paint, and sing and dance.
By around 5pm, most of us began heading back to return our tubes before nightfall, to get our deposits back.
It was at this point that I and my fellow travellers grew concerned about how to get off the river.
We made a human chain by grabbing each other's tubes and floated until we saw a clearing on the river's edge.
We helped each other climb up the bank and even took a victorious "we survived tubing" photo once we found a tuk-tuk to get us back to town, where we rewarded our survival with deep-fried Nutella pancakes from a street-side vendor.
Things did get a little hairy there, and it was lucky that a group of us stuck together for support.
The only negative memory I have of Vang Vieng was watching tourists rowdily stumble through the otherwise quiet streets, drunk and perhaps drug-affected after a day on the river.
Rather disrespectful, considering Laos is a mostly Buddhist nation, where one of the five rules that people live by is to abstain from alcohol.
Dr David Beirman, senior lecturer in tourism at the University of Technology, Sydney, said it has always been a rite of passage for young Australians to engage in risky behaviour when travelling overseas.
Laos - which is cheap and easily accessible from the tourist hot spot of Thailand - just happens to be their new destination.
"You always find there are a certain number of people who feel it's sort of a rite of passage to do something really dumb, particularly if it's the first trip away for a young person - young people think they're bulletproof," said Dr Beirman.
"Years ago one of the things that a lot of Australians, particularly males, were doing was going to the running of the bulls in Pamplona.
"In Laos, they just get a rubber tube, jump into the rapids and hope for the best.
"Jumping in a river that you don't know about is potentially life threatening."
The potential for disaster in Laos deepens when combined with the lack of infrastructure, including medical facilities in the relatively new tourism destination.
"The critical issue here is for travellers, particularly when they're going to places where tourism is still in its early stages, they probably need to take a little bit more care and make sure that they do have insurance and perhaps avoid some of the more extreme risks," said Dr Beirman.
Travellers also need to be aware that Laos remains a fairly traditional society and, unlike neighbouring Thailand, which seems to have adapted more to tourists, visitors to Laos are expected to adhere to Laos ways. This was made clear to me when a few of us were asked by a local to put our clothes on, just seconds after stepping out from a swim at the Kuang Si falls.
Standing just two metres from the water's edge, wrapped in towels, we were told we were being impolite - which is fair enough, just a stricter attitude than I'd expected.
Sexual relations between foreigners and Laotians are also prohibited.
Paula Ganly, assistant secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's Consular Policy Branch, said Laos's popularity as a tourism destination was booming worldwide with 2012 being promoted as Visit Laos Year by the Laotian government.
Around 2.5 million people travelled to the land-locked nation in 2010 - 30,000 from Australia - and Ms Ganly believes this number will only get higher.
But with the nation still in its early stages of development, travellers need to take more care than usual and avoid taking risks that they wouldn't take at home, she said.
"Laos is grouped as one of the least developed countries and it doesn't have the same safety standards as we would have in Australia, so accidents can happen," said Ms Ganly.
"People will get on a motorbike without a helmet overseas that they wouldn't do if they were in Australia.
"The (Nam Song) river does flow quite quickly down there, it's also very low at this time of year so diving into the river can be dangerous and there's a lot of debris that flows down."
Ms Ganly said the recent deaths in Laos appear to be nothing but very sad accidents, which can happen whether you're in Laos or Australia.
It shouldn't reflect badly on the destination, or tubing.
Travellers just need to take care and try to understand more about this up-and-coming destination.
