Sihanoukville

We caught the bus from Phnom Penh yesterday. It was a nice bus trip, only 4 hours and the road was lovely.. especially compared to the road from Poipet!

When we arrived at the bus station we were astonished to realise that the only transportation available was by motorbike.. not a tuk tuk in sight, not at the bus station and not on the roads. We have done our best so far not to ride any bikes.. they scare the hell out of me for one and we have met SOOOO many people who have had accidents. It was murphys law though.. just two days before I had said to Luke how well we had done not to have to get on one!

We stood around for a while trying to think of ways NOT to get on the bike but in the end we had to admit defeat and climb on. Our driver promised to go slowly (in fact he said that if he didnt go slowly enough I didnt have to pay him!) we climbed on the back of the bike (a bike each.. not like the locals who somehow manage to fit four or five people on one bike!) with our luggage up the front between the drivers knees and off we went! The road was wet (eek) and potholed (this isnt surprising) and of course we had no helmets (sorry mums) it was scary even though we were going so slowly but in the end we arrived at our guesthouse in one piece. Luckily we are right near the beach and loads of restaurants so we won’t need to do that again until the bus trip out of here.

We are staying at the New Christmas Bungalows, which is about a five minute walk from the beach (although it hasnt stopped raining since we arrived!) We took a walk down to the beach to find something for dinner and we were immediately surrounded by kids (again). We ended up agreeing to let them make some bracelets for us, four in all with our names on them (and one for melissa and lisa). I thought they would probably do them overnight and bring them to us the next day but instead they spent the night sitting on the floor behind our restaurant table (or crowding around it) making them for us.

We promised to by some cotton shimp from them the next day (8 in all – they made me pinky promise!) and this morning when we arrived on the beach all of them came running at us from different directions to make sure we kept our promise. Of the eight from the day before only 6 were around but there were probably another 10 kids as well trying to get us to buy fruit or massages or leg waxes. We bought the shrimp that we had promised to buy (what on earth are we going to do with eight cotton shrimp????) and spent the next two hours fighting off kids from all directions.. it was a lot of fun though and the guy who owns the restaurant where we had lunch was a great sport about it. I think most restaurant owners would have kicked them out into the rain but after asking us if we were ok (we were) then he was happy to let them stay.

Three kids in particular were really great, Hayley who is about 14 and incredibly smart (her english is almost perfect) and Chean and Pia two younger boys both of which made the bracelets for us yesterday. They were wrestling with Luke for ages trying to throw him into the ocean! We have promised hayley that we will only buy fruit from her, and Pia and Chean have made us agree that if we want necklaces we have to see them. In fact every section of the business has been claimed by one kid or another!

In other news I am feeling better about the whole S21 thing. I slept with the lights on for two nights (god that’s embarrassing) but last night I had them off (I didnt want to but I figured I would have to eventually) I read the first book of the two we bought and am halfway through the second. They are very sad and niether of the authors are able to explain why it all happened so I still have a lot of questions.. but I guess everyone except those responsible do.

I can’t help looking at the people older than me and wondering what their stories are. I wish I could talk to people about it but I am not sure if it’s the polite thing to do. Why would you want to relive it if you didnt have to? I guess I will have to make do with reading more books.

Well no more news for now.. let hope the weather clears up so we can get some sunshine while we are at the beach! (and lets hope our willpower gets better and we are able to say no to the kids! They are costing us a fortune!)

***DISCLAIMER: The following post may be offensive to some readers. Reader discretion (or parental) is advised!!!***

Angkor Wat

Well we have spent the last two days exploring the temples around Angkor Wat. To be honest, I didn’t have huge expectations, after seeing so many ruins and temples in Thailand I kind of thought I would see the first two sites and then lose interest all together. But the whole thing was magnificent! I dont even know how many places we visited in the end, probably 7 or 8 on the first day and 5 or 6 on the second. The temples were incredible, it was like stepping into another world! It’s funny because the whole place is CRAWLING with tourists, every temple we went to had at least a hundred other people with cameras attached to their faces, but for some reason, even with all those other people around you can sit on a fallen stone, a piece of wall or something and feel completely isolated from the world. A lot of times you can’t even hear anyone else around.. It’s incredibly surreal!

Angkor Wat is the largest of the temples and is in the best shape as well, I guess it’s the main drawcard of the area so a lot of money has been spent on restoration. The parts of the temple that they have had to reconstruct have all been done in plain concrete so you are able to see the original parts and the new parts, which is good. The building is only three levels but is about ten stories high and to get to the highest tower you have to climb these stone steps. The staircase is around fifteen metres high and is incredibly steep.. so much so that when you are at the top you can’t see any of the stairs.. it just looks like the ground falls away beneath your feet. Getting up wasnt too bad but getting down was really scary! I am not usually scared of heights but I was shaking and really nervous about it. The scariest part is that there is no hand rail or anything to hold onto except the steps above you so there is nothing to steady yourself on.. and nothing to grab hold of if you fall!!! Oh! and because the steps are a thousand years old, there are places where they have worn away or chipped off so sometimes there is nowhere to put your foot beneath you and you have shuffle along the step you are on until it is safe to keep going down. It was scary for me, but can you imagine being someone who built the building, climbing up those stairs with another huge slab of stone on your back? just thinking about it makes me nauseous!

It was amazing to be able to sit up there though, with the sunlight streaming through the windows and highlighting all the carvings in the stone. We actually found out that when they built the buildings the stones werent carved. they actually do that AFTER the building is complete! Its hard to imagine! Especially when the temples are so high. Some of them had three levels and then a stone statue on top, at least another story high. Each carving is so intricate as well, it must have taken so many years to get it all carved! Some columns have huge inscriptions, beautiful cambodian script from roof to floor. The writing is so fine as well, almost like someone typed it out, you have to keep reminding yourself that someone sat there with a chisel and shaped each indent in the stone.

I dont remember the names of all the places we went to but the range was incredible! After Angkor Wat we went to a place called the Bayon which had not yet had any restoration work done to it at all so we were climbing through the rubble to look around, so much fun. My favourite place though (which I dont remember the name of) was a temple that was in the middle of the forest. Like the secret garden if it had been abandoned for a thousand years. The place was crawling with vegetation, flowers poking through the cracks in these huge stones and the trees! Massive, ancient trees, their trunks as big as a house, growing up through and around and over the buildings, their roots like vines snaking down over doorways or walls and the actually tree growing on the roof of the building. It was stunning!

We took loads of photos – of course! But at the moment we are using a dial up connection so we are going to wait until we get to Phnom Pehn before we upload them.

After the first day we were EXHAUSTED!! And when we woke up for our second day of exploring our whole body groaned with the effort of getting out of bed.. legs especially.. those steps were a killer!

The second day wasnt as good as the first but it was still pretty spectacular, we saw another jungle infested ruin and some pink sandstone structures. And lots more steps which we grudgingly climbed, whimpering all the way! The further we got from Siem Reap, the less beautiful the temples were, some of them had been built but not carved so they were just blank stone. Or they would be very plain, just a couple of rooms. Every one of them still had this incredible feeling about them. Calm and other worldly but the temples we visited on the first day were by far the most inspiring!

Mau, our driver, was great! Always telling us the names of the temples and the names of the men who built them as he dropped us off at each entrance. And – after our morning at Angkor Wat when we couldnt find him in the crowd of tuk tuk’s and were accosted by kids for half an hour – he was always very good about getting us in and out of the temple without too much hassle from the hawkers.

As for the morning at Angkor Wat, we had come out of the temple (after two hours we had to DRAG ourselves out) and we couldn’t find Mau, there were probably 150 tuk tuks in the car park, he hadn’t seen us because he was asleep in the back of his tuk tuk and we had instantly been swarmed by kids, one boy who had remembered me from the day before because I had bought postcards off his friend and not off him who stared up at me with his bottom lip quivering. Luke’s young girl from the day before had recognised him from the day before (he bought postcards as promised). When we arrived at Angkor Wat a boy had come over to us and made us promise to buy water from him when we came out of the temple, we had agreed and he said his name was spiderman. Anyway when we came out a bunch of kids had come over asking us to buy some water from them and we had said no (waiting for spiderman) but when he came over finally and we bought a drink of him all the other kids got really offended because they thought they had asked first and it wasn’t fair. Each kid who came over to talk to us would chat and then follow us as we walked around so by the time we finally found Mau we had about thirty kids following us around. We climbed into the tuk tuk and only then did we start handing out our lollipops (before then I had been worried that more kids would see and come running and we wouldnt have enough).

At the next temple we ran into the same thing but in the middle of the temple (where there was no mau to save us) we had sat down to drink a coke and they started streaming out of the trees. We bought an Angkor Wat tshirt each and a bracelet (we had also bought the cokes off one) and still they werent happy, I tried to explain that I couldn’t buy from everyone and that I was sorry but they just looked sad and dirty.. it was awful! There was one girl who was particularly persistant and who sat with us for the whole time we sat drinking our cokes. we chatted with her for a long time (her english was amazing!) and I was feeling really bad about not buying from but then I asked her ‘where does the money go?’ thinking she would tell me her family or something like that and then I could justify myself being a weak sucker and buying more stuff.. but instead she glanced at me, looked away and then asked me a completely unrelated question. I asked her again and the same thing happened. After asking about four times over the course of ten minutes or so I realised she wasnt going to answer.

Stella asked me if I got desensitised to the kids. Well Stella, my answer is no. I cant pretend they dont exist (like so many other people seem able to do) but this little conversation made it much easier to say no to them. After that I was happy to hand out lollies instead of money. I started noticing that only the cutest kids are the ones out selling stuff and I don’t know how that can be.. is there a recruitment drive at their schools? Where the cutest kids get handpicked by some rich man? The sad thing is that she could have lied and I would have believed her, in fact I wanted to hear the lie. But she didnt, or couldnt…

We still looked at every kid, saw all of them, still smiled when we said no them (which usually meant a much longer saying no process!) we handed out our lollies and some pens or coloured paper (and secretly a few Reil notes). My rubber bracelets, of which I used to have thirty odd, are now numbered at 8. (Mel, your ‘make poverty history’ bracelet was the favourite, every kid asked for it but I wouldnt give it up!).

There was one temple where we spoke to an older boy by the name of Phalla who was going to a special school in Siem Reap run by Australians. When he heard us telling another kid where we were from he came rushing over to us to chat. We spent almost an hour with him standing in the shade talking about all sorts of things. He was the happiest kid I have ever met, so excited about the future.. at the moment he has an american sponsor who is paying for his schooling. He wants to go to university. I so hope that his american sponsor sticks around, without her I dont think he has much in his future to be excited about. It makes me so sad. Anyway in the end we got his email address and promised to email him about our trip. Hopefully that way if his American sponsor does for some reason stop being his sponsor maybe he will tell us and we can help out.

The hardest thing about seeing all these kids, so beautiful and so hopeless, is that as much as I want to help, I know that there isnt an answer. Money wont help, they will take it home and give it to the boss of the postcard racket or to their parents and tomorrow they will still be wearing the same clothes with the same shoes falling off their feet. Most of them will never get to school and those who do will most likely end up back in their parents house living the same way after school is done with. Maybe there is a way. But I havent thought of one yet. Short of stealing a bunch of kids and bringing them home with me! And even then we will have a bunch of distraught parents here in Cambodia and a bunch of displaced kids in Australia.. I have been searching my brain for the solution… I’ll let you know when the results are in!

Phew! ok.. well, that enough rambling from me for now. We are catching a bus to Phnom Penh tomorrow morning so the photos should be up in the next couple of days.

Oh, and despite my rambling about the kids and how sad it all was Angkor Wat really is superb. If any of you get the chance to come and see it, please do! You wont regret it!!

Passport stamps, bruised heads and breathtakingly beautiful children…

Yesterday was a long day! It’s strange how doing nothing but sitting on a bus can be so tiring! We woke up at 6 am (after only 3 hours sleep!) and caught a taxi (with the help of a hotel receptionist who acted as a translator) to Humphalong Train Station. We had a quick breakfast and jumped on our big cushy vip bus. Luke and I sat at the front of the top section (it was double decker) surrounded by huge windows.. what a great way to watch the world go by!

The first part of the trip took about 5 hours (during which we watched The Amityville Horror) and we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/travel agency where everyone had a chance to get their Cambodian Visas (we had already organised ours in Vientiane). We jumped back on the bus for another 15 minutes or so and then we said goodbye to our cushy bus, donned our backpacks and forced our way through dozens of children and started the dusty walk over the border.

We walked for about five minutes until we came to a little room with a big queue and a much welcomed fan. We waited in line to get our departure stamp then crossed the road to make our way to the Cambodian arrivals section. We passed two hotels and four casinos on the way and eventually found ourselves in a small garage-like room, open at one end with a door off to the side and glassed off counters at the far end. We stood in another queue and got another stamp (after smiling into a webcam) then walked outside and sat in the shade.

We were herded by our travel company into a tuk tuk and driven to a bank, which wasnt really a bank but a man sitting behind a glass cabinet filled with huge stacks of Cambodian reil, where we changed our money and then we walked next door to await the arrival of our bus.

Eventually the Cambodian version of our cushy VIP bus arrived – a very small and very dusty mini bus. We piled inside with an Australian couple from Torquay, a Swedish couple who ignored everyone all day, two boys from the UK who reminded me of smithy and made me a little home sick and three Cambodian men. They squished all our luggage inside and off we went! We weren’t incredibly comfortable but when we saw the local transportation we were all very happy to be squished inside our mini bus. The locals travel in a dump truck!! You pay extra to sit in the cab with the driver but if you cant afford it (or the seat is already taken) you pile into the back of the dump truck and squash your way between the tens of people already on board. If your lucky you get a rice sack to sit on but mostly you lean on other people! And the road was so dusty! I don’t know how they could even breathe! Everything as far as the eye could see was covered in a thick red blanket of dust. The trees looked like they were on the verve of autumn, mostly red, with only small patches of green showing through.

The trip from the border (Poipet) to Siem Reap was 180kms but the first 50kms took over two hours! The road was in incredibly bad shape and we spent two hours with our teeth chattering in our skulls and our heads banging on the roof, there were pot holes the size of bathtubs! It was bumpy but beautiful.. after driving through Laos and Thailand where we were almost always surrounded by mountains it was strange to be able to see the horizon! For huge stretches of time there would be nothing to see at all except a lone tree against the blue sky. Other times we drove through villages filled with huts held together with hessian bags and rope where children outnumbered the adults (and from the looks of it worked just as hard. Not once did we see children playing like we had in Laos, all of them were carrying huge bags or buckets of water or they were working in the fields with their parents).

After our first two hours we stopped at another restaurant for a much needed caffeine fix and a toilet break then we squished back into the mini bus and bumped our way down the road. Our driver assured us that the road got better from there on in and he was partly right. For about an hour we drove in relative comfort (by no means smoothly but better nonetheless) we watched the sun set over the fields and then no sooner than we were all starting to drift off the sleep the road jumped up to remind us that it was there.

After another hour of bumped heads and bruised shoulders we finally arrived in Siem Reap. We drove down the main street and what a shock after the poverty of the villages! The streets were lined with hotel after hotel after hotel. Hundreds of them, all massive concrete structures with countless rooms and spotlights trained on them. Each with an ugly statue out front, the size of an elephant, begging attention. Fountains and fairy lights and columned entrances galore.. it was almost perverse!!

Eventually we left the main street and wove our way through the smaller streets until we came to the Angkor View Guesthouse. We hadnt planned on staying there but in the end it was too easy. We couldnt be bothered finding ourselves anywhere else, so for $6US we got ourselves a room. It’s actually a really nice place, more like a hotel than anywhere else we have stayed.. they have room service for god’s sake!!

We slept in this morning and spent the afternoon lounging on the balcony reading and playing pool. (I won 2 out of five but I suspect Luke was letting me win). At 4:30 we made our way downstairs and met with Mau who we had spoken to the night before as we ate dinner. He had agreed to be our driver for the next few days, we got him to drive us to the bank to cash in some travellers cheques and then he took us to Angkor Wat to watch the sunset.

We will be exploring the area properly over the next two days so we didnt have too much of a look around but what we did see was spectacular! The place is massive and the stone work is incredible!! so intricate! Its hard to imagine that the whole place was handcarved out of stone! We wandered around for about an hour and watched the sun set behind the temples and then we made our way back to Mau. The instant we hit the Angkor Wat entrance we were bombarded with children.. so many children! All with dirty faces, torn up clothing and the biggest shiniest smiles you have ever seen. They were selling postcards and jewellery and countless other things. They grabbed at our clothes and tugged our arms and begged us to buy whatever it was they were selling. We had already bought some postcards from a young boy inside so we said no and all but the most persistent left.

Luke was followed by a little girl of about ten and I had a little boy, probably around 6 or so. He looked up at me with his giant brown eyes and his massive smile and told me how beautiful his postcards were and how different they were from everybody elses postcards, he followed me all the way to the tuk tuk where I climbed in and turned back to face him (I was feeling guilty). He stood by the tuk tuk smiling up at me and tried to convince me to take his postcards but by now he knew I wasnt going to buy them. I was ruffling his hair and telling him that they were indeed beautiful postcards while luke combatted his own child. A girl named mau who asked him where he was from and then proceeded to tell him everything she knew about Australia (she was actually pretty knowledgable too!). Luke promised mau that when we came back tomorrow we would buy some postcards from her and climbed inside the tuk tuk next to me. Just as we were about to leave the little boy took hold of my hand and asked for one of my rubber bracelets. I slipped one off my wrist and handed it to him just as we started to take off. I wanted to go back and bring him home with us! He was so sweet and gentle. I can’t help wondering what will become of him…

Mau (our driver, not lukes little girl) asked where we wanted to go and we asked him to take us to a supermarket where we stocked up on chupa chups and other such lollies to give to the kids tomorrow. I know it’s not going to make anything better for them but I don’t think giving them money for whatever they are selling will either. At least this way they get a treat and maybe we will get some smiles.. a fair deal I think!

We are meeting up with Mau tomorrow at 8am for our tours of the area. I am sure there will be hundreds of photos.. enough to bore you all to tears anyway!

Until next time…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AUNTIE KYLIE!!!

Bangkok

We have absolutely nothing to report.
We havent done anything interesting.
No sightseeing, no cultural growth, no learning
Just eating lots of food and seeing lots of movies
oh and wandering around in airconditioned comfort.
Its been lovely.. Comfortable and tasty and lovely

We are planning on spending the rest of the weekend scouring the markets here in Bangkok and then on Monday we will catch the train the Aranya Prathet where we cross over into Cambodia.

CIVILISATION!!

Yay for airconditioning and 711’s and chain food stores and cinemas and hard rock ribs!
Bangkok is just as smelly as I remember and just as noisy but its damn good to be here.

Since our last update we did the crossing borders thing again from Laos to Thailand. That was a long day.. involving a tuk tuk, an hour wait in the back of a songlaw, an hour long drive to the border, a long and hot walk down a dusty road lined with the Laos version of duty free shopping, a departure stamp, an arrival stamp, another tuk tuk, two more hour long songlaw trips and then a taxi ride from the train station at Ubon Ratchathani to our hotel.

Ubon was nice but not really what we were expecting. Its quite a large town so we were expecting city like stuff and instead found a big small town. We spent most of our time walking around in the hot sun trying to find somewhere to eat or drink. The challenge was finding somewhere that had an english speaking person or an english version of the menu.. One night we thought we’d hit the jackpot when we came across a sign that said “AGAIN BAR AND RESTAURANT” but when we went inside there was no menu. The owner motioned for us to sit down and had to call his friend who spoke english asking them to come in. The friend was a lovely girl with broken english. We managed to order cokes and ‘something nice’ from the restaurant. It wasnt very nice but we felt so bad for making her come to the restaurant that we showered her (and the food) with praise.

Last night we caught the train from Ubon to Bangkok. 12 hours. We paid extra for the 2nd class ticket which means you get a sleeper but more importantly means you are guaranteed a seat. It was a long night and we arrived in bangkok at stupid oclock this morning (5am). We got some coffee and some bagels and waited around the station for a while watching tuk tuk drivers compete for our attention then at 6:30 – we waited for the sun to rise – we called to make a reservation at our hotel, jumped in a cab and fell into bed at the Pranee Building, right in the middle of Bangkok.

Not sure what our plan is for the next few days. Probably just enjoying the citiness of the city. We will give Gap a call tomorrow and hopefully catch up with him on Friday night. But right now we are heading to the Hard Rock Cafe for some well deserved Hard Rock Ribs!!!

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.