caves, haircuts and the longest most painful bus ride in the world

So.. we finally found a town in Laos where the people actually smile! What a lovely find! We caught the bus from Vientiane to Tha Khaek as planned, arriving at 1:30 in the morning. We rode a tuk tuk to our chosen guesthouse which, thankfully, had an after hours service bell. A sleepy man in a white towel came to the door and showed us to a large but smelly room on the second floor. We decided to take it.. partly because we felt bad for waking him up, but mostly because it was by now 2am and we didnt care where we slept!

The next day we decided to sign ourselves up for a tour of the area. The man at the guesthouse wasn’t much help and, instead of signing us up or giving us any information he just pointed us toward the tourist information centre in town. We looked at our map, decided it wasnt too far to walk, and set off. It turns out it was too far to walk – I had stupidly misread the map and, when looking at the distance legend read 200m when it was, in fact, 500m!

The walk was well worth the effort though! What a great town Tha Khaek is! Every single person we met said hello, (or sabadee if they didnt know english) people waved and smiled and kids giggled and chased us down the street or shouted “Good Morning!” as they rode by on their bikes (even though it was well into the afternoon). We walked past a party of some sort where there were speakers set up and a group of people dancing they shouted at us and waved as they danced around. It was great!

Later on we were walking down a sidestreet and three kids came screaming out of their house. Two girls and a boy, the boy in the lead. He reached us first and shook both our hands vigorously, chattering away excitedly. The two little girls were giggling and talking. They skipped and ran around us in circles three or four times and then each of the girls took one of Lukes hands. They looked up at him smiling sweetly and talking at a million miles an hour. Every now and then they would stop talking to him, look at each other and start giggling, then they would look back up at him and chatter away all over again. They were probably about 5 or so. By now the boy, disgusted with the girls behaviour, had gone back inside and Luke was left standing there looking overwhelmed by all the attention. We had no idea what they were saying, even if we were able to understand Laos they were talking way to fast for comprehension! Eventually Luke was able to get his hands free. We wandered off down the street saying goodbye and waving goodbye. The girls stood there – still chatting – waving at us until we were out of sight.

After what felt like an eternity we found the Tourist Information Centre. We had actually walked by it twice. I think we were expecting a properly signed place, something at least a little official looking. What we found though was a very small wooden box of a building, it’s door on the wall not facing the road (helpful) the sign, a wooden plank nailed to the door had white paint, peeling away so you could barely see it. It was closed and looked strangely devoid of information.. empty even! Luckily there was a man sitting outside on his tuk tuk who was more than happy to help. He agreed to take us on a tour of the caves the next day. It even worked out cheaper than if we had managed to book the actual tour!

The next morning at stupid oclock (7:30am) we met our driver outside our guesthouse. We drove for about half an hour through the countryside. Making a stop along the way where we picked up two passengers, one with a very large rifle which he sat on his lap. I immediately convinced myself that our tuk tuk driver was going to take us to the forest and rob us (I blame this paranoia on my lack of sleep!) I sat there as we drove agonising about our future and trying to smile politely at the man with the gun. After about five minutes our driver stopped again and the two passengers climbed out the back of the tuk tuk, they waved to us and smiled cheerfully and I immediately felt guilty for not trusting them!

The first cave he took us to was HUGE and would have been a great cave to visit a few years ago. Now though, it is filled with man made concrete steps to make it easier to navigate. It had its charm though. The steps, which were the same colour as the limestone kind of made it look like an old abandoned underground city. We were the only people there which was nice. The main room of the cave was about 60m high and 100m wide.. INCREDIBLE!

The second cave was a little harder to get to, there were still steps but this time only on the outside, and instead of concrete they were just cut into the ground. As we walked inside our guide said “no-one comes to this cave much anymore, there are a lot of bats” we went inside and luke and wandered off to explore (it was a little difficult because we had forgotten our torch) I was walking along a narrow part of the cave when something caught my eye. I stopped and looked at it for a while trying to make my brain recognise what it was. I tried using the red eye reduction light on our camera but that didnt help. It was sitting at eye height, nestled into a hole in the limestone and was shaped like a chocolate frog. I kept staring at it and then suddenly everything clicked into place. I heard our guide warning us about the bats and realised that he may very well have said rats (after all since when did bats in a cave make it less popular?) at the same time that the word ‘rats’ entered my head my eyes recognised a long white tail coming out of the back of the thing. I shuddered and walked quickly back to the entrance of the cave to sit with our guide. I didnt tell Luke though.. partly because I didnt want to freak him out and partly because i wasnt actually SURE it was a rat, after all I had not long ago convinced myself that our tuk tuk driver was going to rob us at gunpoint!

Luke continued exploring the cave (and he didnt find any other rats so I’m glad I didnt tell him!) and I sat in the sun and chatted with our tuk tuk driver (who incidently is a tuk tuk driver only on weekends, during the week he is a secondary school teacher!) Eventually luke came back and we went onto our next cave. This one was not accessable by car so we walked down by the river until we found it. Not so much a cave it was really just an opening in the mountain but it was gorgeous, we had to do some rock scrambling but eventually found ourselves a nice place to sit. The cave was filled with water so all of the limestone formations were mirrored on the ground. it was beautiful.

Our last cave was not as good as the story behind it. But it was still worth the visit. Our driver dropped us off and he sat down to have a drink while we navigated our way to the cave opening over planks of wood balanced on sludge, paid our entrance fee to a man with one eye (and one very pink eye socket) and started up the steps to the cave. We were immediately called back and a woman wrapped me up in a sarong, I thought she was trying to sell it to me and tried to say no but she got really angry and yelled at me. Apparently you have to wear it up to the cave.. noone was able to explain this but we figured it out by watching another woman enter. So I wore the sarong and we climbed to the top of the steps. The actual cave was only discovered in April last year, by a man who was trying to catch a bat for dinner (yuk) he scaled the wall of the mountain (this is really incredible – the wall is dead straight and the cave opening is about 100ft up) and found himself climing over a ledge. Once on the ledge he saw the cave opening (which is small enough that you have to crouch through) and inside the cave he found over 200 brass buddha statues ranging from 15cm to 1m high. I have no idea how the people got them up there!! especially the big ones! Anyway the cave was then turned into a temple and people go there to worship. Its a bit of a shame really. Most of the cave is closed off and there is a guard there to make sure noone touches the images (they are behind a partition). We ended up only spending a few minutes there before heading back down. I gave my sarong back to the old lady – who gave me a nasty look, we thanked the man with one eye and went back to our driver who took us back to town.

Our afternoon was spent cutting off our dreadlocks. Lukes first and then mine. He looks great with a little afro and I look ridiculous (though not because Luke is a bad hairdresser just because I dont like my hair short). It is so much cooler though!

Yesterday we caught the bus from Tha Khaek to Pakse. Seven hours of hell! It’s almost as if the bus company was trying to make the ride as uncomfortable as possible! We managed to get a seat which was a good start and lucky really because sitting on the floor would have been out of the question! The bus was full of locals who thought nothing of using the floor of the bus as a rubbish bin. A little girl was spitting her orange seats into the isle, an old woman was discarding her egg shells over her shoulder without a second thought, and the person behind us – gender unknown – hawked up wet globby messes to spit onto the floor, every 15 minutes like clockwork. It was stomach turning!

Then there was the music. Constant, grating noise, played through speakers too old to take the volume, speakers that grunted the lows and screeched the highs. It was so loud that luke and I had to shout to be heard, it warbled and squealed and croaked, loud enough to obliterate thought. It was like a physical presence! Like an old smelly man who stands too close! You couldnt think, you couldn’t read, you certainly couldnt sleep and listening to our own music was out of the question, even at full volume we wouldnt have been able to hear it. Then, on top of the music – just in case you didnt already feel like pulling out your hair – was the driver and his damned horn.. for seven hours he sat on that damn horn. sometimes sharp little jabs as if he was trying to keep time with the music, sometimes long, painful, seemingly endless screams. Beeping at nothing, or everything – it was difficult to tell.

And up on the wall, at the front of the bus, sitting silently and watching over everything, a clock, making sure that every miserable minute was properly acknowledged. A big stupid clock that I couldnt help but stare at. Every minute felt like an eternity and even if I was able to look away, when I looked back after what felt like hours the minute hand would be sitting only a fraction closer to the end of the trip. I have never been so happy to get off a bus.. even death highway was better!!

If I never catch another Loas bus I will be happy!

As for Pakse, it seems nice. We havent seen much but we will have a proper look around in the next couple of days!!

Enough typing! I am exhausted!

Bye

We are no longer the dreaded duo!!

Because Livejournal has an easy photo upload now….

Caving in Vang Vieng. Laos.