Kayaking in the Vang Vieng

After spending a few lovely days in Luang Prabang we decided to move on. Vang Vieng was to be our next stop, which was a half day journey by mini van. It was such a beautiful drive around jungle covered emerald mountains. However, that wasn’t the only thing that was many shades of green, poor old Rob didn’t get on with the very windy roads (one thing that can be said about coming from Mid Wales, you do get used to windy roads!!!) and changed all different colours throughout our trip.

Once we got there (at this point we had lost the rest of our group – all of us had booked different methods of getting to our destination) we booked into the most lovely of all our accommodation in SE Asia. It was a brand new wooden bungalow on stilts with fantastic bathroom and a lovely balcony with a large tree trunk wooden table, and a brand new mosquito net to boot!

About 10 mins after checking in who should we see but Roald and the rest of the group scoping out the same apartments! I soon discovered this as we travelled – you really do just keep bumping into the same people again and again and again. No need to plan meeting up – it will just happen. Unfortunately there were no rooms left in our complex so Roald and crew headed down the road.

We then met up with Athur and Yehel (by accident again!) and had a drink with them and Kat, Mags and Angelique (more boat people we met in Luang Prabang) and we decided to go on a day trip Kayaking down a part of the Mekong the next day.

We got to the start point of our day and were given our 2 man canoes and told we had to paddle straight across the river as we were going to look at a cave and a temple first. Me and Rob jumped into our canoe and paddled off and much to our pleasure got across very successfully while watching others being carried off down the river with the instructor yelling ‘KEEP PADDLING!!!’ Once we were all safely on dry land again, we walked for about 20 mins until we got to a cave. The entrance to the cave was mostly under water, and we were all issued with tractor tyre inner tubes. We were also given a head torch which resembled a primary school basic circuitry lesson (literary just a bulb on elastic attached to a little car battery type thing with the battery having a piece of string tied to it so you could hang it round your neck and to turn the torch on and off you simply screwed or unscrewed the bulb!) After putting the head gear on, we had to put the inner tube into the water, jump into the middle of the tube and then grab a rope which was tied from the bank and led into the darkness of the cave…..

So in a line with the rest of the group, instructor either side of us we pulled ourselves into the cave. (I was a little nervous as my last caving experience did not go too well and ended up with me getting lost and loosing the group – I figured it would be extremely bad luck for this to happen twice!!) Once in it was fantastic. The temperature dropped and the walls remained tight in, but you could see and touch all the droplets on the ceiling and the water was a wonderful green colour. The further we pulled ourselves in, ducking for the occasional ceiling obstacle the darker and darker it got, we eventually hit land again and following the guide we crawled through slippery warm mud, stones and a stream to find a large cave which had lots of the stalactites and mites. The highlight of the caves had to be the bats. It started with just one, a blur in corner of the eye and a thought of “did I see that?” Then there were too many not be sure. They flew really close – hurtling around and between us then back into the darkness with faint flaps and squeaks. That was when the realisation hit us though; it was not mud we were crawling through after all, just a rather large mound of bat shit! Back in our tubes we floated back to the river and our start point at the bank. We washed our thoroughly exfoliated hands and knees in the river and sat at the dinner table, wet and happy!

After a very tasty lunch of BBQ skewers and rice we walked to a temple. This temple was where many of the locals went to pray, and also had a goddess of fertility and a god of wealth. The thing that was special about this temple though was it was built inside of the cave, and on the left side of the cave there was a natural feature which looked (if you looked very hard…I’ll let you look at the photographs – might depend on how much acid you have taken….) like an elephant. Strikingly, the temple bell was made from one of the many bomb shells left from the Vietnam war.

After the temple it was back to the canoes. The scenery was lovely down the river and there were a few gentle rapids to give us a little rest and a good splash along the way. We headed down the river with me and Rob increasingly discovering that we had not yet mastered the technique. We probably canoed twice the distance of many of the others, and a few sharp words were exchanged at times!!! But it was fun nevertheless, and just before our end point we stopped at a riverside bar that was set up for the river tubing (will explain more in the next entry) It had a bar, but also a rope swing way out into the water and a tug of war mud pit. I watched as Rob and Yehel and a new found friend from the trip called Tony threw themselves from the 5m high platform down into the water. I watched and then promised on the tubing the next day I would do it – hoping everyone would forget – how wrong I was…….

It was a great taste of the next day’s activities. It was then time to do the last half hour of canoeing. We had been going for a couple of hours before our stop so my arms were quite tired by the time we finished, but to our delight our stop point was less than a 5 minute walk from our bungalow, so we took ourselves off for a well earned warm shower 