Laos - the epilogue

It seems that the slow pace of life in Laos affects the most ardent of blogging fans and completely saps their will to blog, email or do anything else for that matter, not directly related to some form of relaxation. We took the bus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. Vang Vieng is not even really a town. It is a village that happens to be on the back packer trail and has thus grown. The fact that there is great natural beauty around it does not hurt either.

We stayed in a really nice little guest house tucked away by the side of the river. The bungalow we had was really nice, open and airy, overloooking the river the limestone peaks in the distance. The vista was quite stunning as we lay savouring it on our bed. We decided that since we had gone hiking in Chiang Mai we should go caving in Vang Vieng, for variety. But we changed our minds the next morning and decided to go to for the hard trek. They weren't kidding when they said hard trek. Maria had been sick for a couple of days and had barely eaten anything in two days and so she began to run out of steam after a little while and felt faint. Heide, a very athletic (read: marathoner) german woman was our trekking mate. She offered to take Maria's pack for a while. Since I am always armed to the teeth with food and I had an orange that helped bring the colour back to her cheeks and she was in good form again. After an 800 m ascent and a descent into what looked like the garden of Eden, we stopped to barbeque and explore the cave that we had reached. The guide took care of the cooking while we headed into the cave. But after the cave became pitch black, we could see strange shapes in the ceiling with our flashlights. Not wanting to wake up what in my mind were the biggest bats known to man, we decided to head back out. The mouth of the cave was enormous and a beautiful stream flowed into it. We bathed and played around in the cold water and then stopped for lunch.

As usual, I overate at lunch. Without much of a post lunch break, we headed back out. This entailed another 800m ascent and descent and I felt really woozy from hiking after eating too much. When we descended at the other end, we went into a cave which was where the stream that entered the first cave, exited the mountain. The water was cold and a beautiful blue green. We went tubing into the cave. Tubing entails sitting in a big truck inner tube and then going with the flow of the water. In our case, there was a secured line along which we pulled ourselves into the cave. The mouth of the cave was just about 30 cms above the water so we really had to go into a very claustrophobic feeling place. Once inside, the cave opened up but it was pitch black. Luckily we all had headlamps which helped us to follow the guide. We did a loop in the cave and then came back out. Sometimes and we had to crawl on all fours and those sections really made us think about the fact that we can sometimes be claustrophobic even though we never think of ourselves as such. It was a fantastic experience and highly recommended to anybody willing to give it a try.