A Melbourne teenager almost died after drinking toxic alcohol at a Laos tubing strip.
There are reports that Warrandyte 19-year-old Annika Morris’s heart stopped multiple times in hospital after she drank a shot of free whisky at a Vang Vieng bar on Monday.
The girl’s father said she and her friend were on a tubing trip when the incident occurred.
He said if it wasn’t for her friend’s intervention, his daughter would be just ‘another statistic’.
‘She shouldn’t really have survived, that’s the sobering thing. She should’ve died on the river,’ Mr Morris told News Limited.
He said Annika was rushed to a local hospital as her condition deteriorated but recovered after several hours of CPR.
Travel blogs refer to a popular Laotian whiskey called Lao-Lao whiskey, which is highly potent and can be infused with scorpions or snakes.
The near-tragedy comes after three young Australians died in Laos in recent weeks.
Yarraville man Alexander Lee, 22, was found dead with his dutch girlfriend in a Luang Prabang hotel room last week.
Sydney man Lee Hudswell, 26, and Daniel Eimutis, 19, died in separate incidents while tubing in Vang Vieng in January.
Mr Morris said Ms Blyth-Elvin, Annika’s childhood friend, was a ‘legend”, and thanked the backpacker community for rallying around his daughter.
‘If Annika had been by herself she could well have just floated down the river and could be another story of some one found dead down the river,’ he said.
Mr Morris said while he and his wife warned Annika of the perils of travelling, he never expected his daughter to fall ill through a toxic drink.
‘Kids are always going to do this stuff – they’re teenagers and they’re high-risk animals. But I think they should be aware that anything like this that is free is probably highly dangerous,” he said.
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