The Long Strange Trip to Kong Lo Cave

I crossed my fingers and hoped for safety as the boat was enveloped in darkness.  The navigator and driver, just moments earlier had finished their Beer Laos before reluctanly complying to do their job.  We had been engulfed by Kong Lo Cave, a 7.5km long unground river.  After a day and half, two buses, a van, a freight truck and and a taxi, we'd finally ended up exactly where we wanted to be.   Vientienne was a non-entity to say the most.  The biggest tourist attraction was a worn down oriental take on the Arch de Triumph, and it wasn't even taht impressive.  A sign on the arch read, "...up close, it is even less impressive, like a monster of concrete."  If the city itself is mocking it, that is not good.  It was a quaint riverside city, right on the banks of the Mekong, yet not a single cafe sat along it, no beers and coffee near running water for us.  The only thing good to say about it was the food, which was fantastic.  Michelle treated me to a great french meal for my birthday.  I won't describe it, it'll just make you jealous.    Despite the great eats, we had to leave this place quickly.  The second Michelle picked up her passport from the Indian Embassy, we took a bus going anywhere or nowhere, Paksan to be exact, since their were no direct buses so late to the cave.   We'd both fallen asleep on the bus and even though our driver knew our destination, he neglected to stop.  Using a map and the course of the Mekong as reference, I'd figured we'd gone to far.   "Paksan?" Michelle asked the bus conductor.   "Pakse?" He asked back, referring to a city about eight hours down the road.   "No, Pak-san."   The man said nothing, but was obviously irritated.  I wondered how far we'd gone passed the mark.  It was no big loss though, Thaket, the next major town had transport to the cave as well.  About 45 minutes later, the ticket collector yelled, "Paksan!" at us; we'd figured that maybe we were mistaken, the bus was just taking too long, as happens in Laos.  The idea was squashed when we noticed we were in the middle of nowhere.  We then thought we were being ditched, until a bus coing the over way stopped, pulled over and picked us up.   "Paksan?" We asked the new driver.   He nodded.  The bus was packed, seats, aisles, space near the door, the small stairs out the door and all.  Somehow, they managed to squeeze two plastic stools into the aisle for us.  So we went back the way we came.  Michelle and I took guesses of how far we'd gone as the bus packed even more stragglers from the side of the road. We were both wrong.  We'd overshot by two hours!  Our four hour trip became eight in the end and we arrived after dark in Paksan, a town comprised of nothing but dirty sell-all shops and noodle stands.  We didn't see a guest house anywhere.   "I'll ask here if they know a good guest house." Michelle proclaimed.   "Nah, let's just walk further down the highway, there is sure to be a place."   We decided to be a perfect stereotypical picture of the differences between men and women.   "I'll just ask."  Women are alway right.   The shopkeeper's daughter spoke enough English to help us and we were loaded into their van and taken to a guest house for free.  It was a reasonably priced hotel as well, resembling the old motel of the United States past.   We'd already deduced that this one buffalo town did not have a bus station despite its 30,000 person population.  The helpful hotel lady typed a time on her cellphone calculator when we asked, "Bus...Lak So?"  6:00.   We awoke at dawn and sat on our backpacks waiting for a bus that never came.  We were almost about to give up when a song-thiew (essentially a pickup truck with benches in the back), filled with morning glory, boxes, pineapples, some scrap metal, and a giant bag of rice announced he was going in our direction, so we cleared a space in the freight and headed down that familiar stretch of highway for the third time.   When we finally left the highway, the scenery was fantastic.  Our driver would stop every few miles and either drop off or pick up more supplies or pack more passengers, apparently, this was the bus.   Four hours later, we were dropped off at the gateway village to Kong Lo.  After finding a guest house, which was not hard; depsite a complete lack of tourists, there were fifty guest houses.  It was low season I guess.  We finally caught a taxi to the cave.   It ws well worth it.  There is a special feeling that comes from taking an underground river through a cave for nearly three miles.  The chambers were huge, the ceilings towering sometimes 100ft above our heads.  A quarter of the way in, we disembarked and the navigator turned on some lights to illuminate the spectacular stalagtites or stalagmites, I can never remember which one is which.  He walked around with head torch, a large battery over his shoulder, lighting up transparent crickets and rock formations, always with a high-pitched giggle.   "Look! Heeheeheeheeheeheehee!"   "Oh look! Heeheeheeheeheeheeheehee!"   We were stuck a mile deep in a cave with a madman!   The cave was simply put, amazing.  Surely a highlight of the trip.  I'm not sure if another cave will ever wow me again.  Just as amazing was the scenery around the cave.  It was well worth the headache getting here.

Vang Vieng

In the mountains of Laos, just North of Vientienne is a gorgeous river town along a wall of karsts, sitting like a green saw blade left on the ground.  Villagers still live their simple lives, herding cattle through streams and harvesting their rice in conical hats.  This slice of the simple, idlyic pastoral life in the spectacular scenery is not the main draw of this popular town; it is the orgy 4km upriver.   We jumped out of the bus in Vang Vieng with the typical dropped jaw the Nothern Laos scenery seems to inspire.  It was late, so we booked a crappy room in the center of town which we shared with a giant spider, then migrated the next morning to a quiet, beautiful riverside hut on the other side of the river.  We were excited about the twon's famous tubing.  The hot weather seemed perfect for floating down a quiet river with a beer in th shadow of the towering wall of limestone mountains.  Our first day was quiet; we hung out in the cafe with Diogo, Blancdine, and Marion, sheltering ourselves fro mthe torrential rains that were coming like clockwork every afternoon.   We saved the tubing for our second day, my birthday.  Diogo, Michelle and I grabbed our tubes and caught a taxi to the start of the famous river run.  WE'd read of the line of makeshift bars on the banks, expecting little huts, jutting into the river with ropes to grab while we ordered beers for the lazy flaot down the peaceful river.  The reality was far from our expectations.   The makeshift bars were actually a circus of daytime nightclubs. At the start of the river was a young Laos man dispensing shots to everyone wishing to cross the bridge, a troll of debauchery taking our souls and sobriety as a toll to pass.  The first bar was packed, which was odd since it was the lamest of the bunch.  A fat, drunk Canadian woman stood at the entrance with a bottle of Tiger Whiskey, the national cheap hooch of Laos, pouring shots directly down our throats.  We'd only been off the taxi for three minutes and we'd already started getting buzzed.    The dance music blared, echoing off the mountains as the British trash danced and yelled. It was as if East London had found a wormhole transporting the saturday night party to the prettiest place in Laos.  We positioned ourselves in the far end of the bar, trying to reprogram ourselves from our expectations of  a quiet river float.    That morning, I had awokedn to a broken laptop, crawled upon the previous night during a poweroutage, so I wsn't really in the mood to party, but as the cheap alcohol did its work, I couldn't help but notice the crazy fun downriver.  I wanted to hate it.  This was a scar on the place, a bastardized picture of disparity between a wild party and a setting so beautiful, one didn't have to do a thing but sit and stare in silent contentment, but I just couldn't ignore the ziplines.   "Why are we sitting here?"  Let's tube to the second bar." I said over the dance music, revelling, and occassional yelling of "Woo!" followed by a splash.  "They have ziplines over there!"   Diogo still had his beer to finish. I passed on one myself, not wanting to pay the insane prices, plus free whiskey was being distributed in every method by IV.  He finished the beer and we threw the tubes in and headed 100m downriver to the next bar.   The river was swift; the bar was situated on near rapids.  Burly Laos youths, looking more like inner-city hooligans sat the shore armed with tethered life preservers that they threw with astounding accuracy.  Despite catching the floating ring, manoevering the tube to shore was not easy, but I made it.  Michelle drifted downriver, we never saw her again.   No, she caught a rope hanging from a tree and eventually made it to land.  We were rewarded for our troubles with more free whiskey.   The star of the second bar a thirty foot high rope swing that most men used to show off their upper-boddy strength to the trashy drunk women with their eternal cigarettes.  Lesser men belly flopped.  I tried it one time, landing safely, but with the slippery conditions from the pouring rain, the speed of the river and my loosening grip with sobriety, I didn't feel like pushing my luck further. I was merely content continually jumping off the seven foot high dock then swimming frantically to shore.   The whole idea was absurd: liquoring up large quanties of white tourists, then find way to chuck them into a raging, deep river from ridiculous heights.  I had to wonder if this wasn't a secret form of warfare: kill the youth of Europe with booze as the Western powers did with bombs in the 60's and 70's to the youth of Laos.  Again, I wanted to hate it so much, but I couldn't: I was having too much fun.   I drank more and dnaced around the mobs of people with makeshift headband advertising their penis size.  Some colored theirselves with crude body paint. One man had even painted "I love rape" upon his chest. (I didn't get that one either.)  Further down the river was a zipline, which I used mulitiple times, going forwards, backwards, dropped from high and even rode it all the way to spring at the end, with painful results.  The whole idea of "tubing" was a formality really.  Very few people tubed more than 200m.  As the evening approached, we ventured to the last main bar, featuring a 50ft high tiled slide that was infamous for its lethal reputation, and fun.  I couldn't stop sliding, it was stupidly fast, high and the adrenaline danger mixed with the booze gave me a special kind of high.   As the sun was setting, the three of us actually tubed the river.  We were trailblazers, the only ones who actually floated down the river.  The bars ended after only a kilometer and we drifted into th darkness.   Three miles is not a long way, but sitting in a tube in the complete darkness made it last forever.  A chilling torrential downpour started with only a kilometer left, and it was quite unnerving to sit alone in the dark, in the rain with lighting all around us.  Diogo had dissappeared; he was quite drunk and feared the worst, especially after he didn't return to our meeting place that night.  Our hut was right on the river and we intended to float right to our door, but we were so cold from sitting, wet in the river that we docked at the first sign of civilization.  It was one of the best birthdays I've ever had.   Diogo emerged the next morning and we convinced Marion adn Blancdine to join us on the river for a second round, sans tubes.  Michelle chose to take it easy and stayed at home.  There was no caution this second day, we embraced the party full force.  I nearly won a limbo contest, right after sitting on the ground in a long line of open mouths as a Canadian guy emptied a whole bottle in our mouths.  The swings and ziplines were sadly shut down; it is unclear exactly what happened, but something between a broken leg and multiple deaths had occured the previous day, none of which surprised me.   I got drunk, really drunk.  We all capped off the evening with a shot of Lao Lao.  I looked to the moutains, raised my glass and begged for forgiveness, then jumped on the waterslide again.