Spelunking and birthday surprises

With three days until our vietnam visas activated, we turned north from our Christmas eve overnight in That Phanom, rode straight back to Nakhon Phanom and beyond it to the Thai Lao Friendship Bridge #3. Riding from the border crossing, the usual Lao road conditions were immediately evident - namely, unpredictable changes in road surface and outgoing children. We rode straight though the evening school commute, so the greetings from children were multitudinous. We ended the day in Thakek, 50km by road but 500 meters across the Mekong from where we started two days prior.

Thakek is a gritty post colonial riverbank town, recently populated as the starting point for a popular motorbike tourist loop, so we were in a concentration of other falangs for the first time in a week. We sat on the waterfront and had a nice multicultural Christmas dinner of pizza, sticky rice, and steamed vegetables with jeow. The next morning, a cool drizzle kept us finding excuses to delay our start. A typhoon had just hit the Philippines and was expected to smash into southern Vietnam, so we wasted time eyeing weather reports, hoping the rain would stop, before finally packing up and cycling east.

Thakek itself is flat, as is Thailand across the river, both in the Mekong floodplain. Unlike the Thai side, huge karst formations spring up immediately outside of town. We quickly found ourselves riding through a thicket of cliffs. Within limestone cliffs, of course, are caves. The area east of Thakek has dozens, several well signposted in English - hats off to the Lao tourism authorities on this one. When the rain thickened, we pulled off the road at the sign to Xien Liap cave. The path to the cave lay behind a school, happily without entrance fee, infrastructure, or other people. We clambered over boulders into the cave maw, hopping from rock to rock across a clear river exiting from the darkness. Inside, the cavern opened before us, with swooping arches carved out in times of higher water. We followed a sliver of natural light along the river, occasional removing our shoes to cross the steam. Eventually the river led to an even larger cave opening, completely traversing through a small mountain. Instead of retracing our steps, we took the three kilometer walk around the limestone pillar back to our bikes through a narrow cliff-bound valley.

Exiting Xien Liap cave

A mile east along the highway, we stopped at Pha In cave. shrines and prayer flags filled the initial cavern before it narrowed into a small dark crevasse. A little ways into the tunnel, the walls become too sheer to climb, so we ditched shoes and clothes and swam into the inky water. This would have felt unacceptably creepy, but the tunnel opened again, only a swimming-pool length away, into a cliff-walled pool below an open ceiling. It was very cool to swim technically inside a cave, but in day-lit green water, in the rain. Maybe it was the drizzle, or maybe the sheer number of caves thinned out tourist density, but we had both caves completely to ourselves. We could climb around in total silence save for the echoing river gurgles.

Pha In cave

Swimming in Pha In cave's secret lake

Although additional caves beckoned, the falling light called us back to the road to Gnommolat - a small town at the junction of the road east to Vietnam and the continued tourist loop to the north - before dark. Our hotel (with "VIP rooms"!) was nice, and we still had to wait two days for the Vietnam visas, so we decided to stay two nights. The next morning (my birthday) Jove mixed me a celebratory 3-in-1 coffee, and we rode north without panniers to explore. 

Landscape around Gnommolat, with some new rice

Above a 1200 foot climb, the landscape changes into a strange watery plateau. The Nam Theun 2 dam, completed in 2010, created a vast lake of long inlets filled with tree graveyards. The lake had an eerie atmosphere, probably due in part to the cloudy weather and relatively brown foliage of the dry season. (Hopefully, resettlement and compensation for the people from such a large footprint of land went better here than along the Nam Ou dam affected areas.) We found a beach at the end of one long peninsula, mostly empty except for a small group of welders at work on small boats. Bizarrely, there were a few enormous boats/ships beached on the shore. They looked like decommissioned Mekong river ferries, but we have no idea how they made their way over a thousand feet up from the Mekong, or what plans are in store for them. The least tilted of the ships was set up with a satellite dish and window shades, and looked like a pretty decent home.

Which of us is leaning?

In the lakeside town of Nakay, we found a very friendly hotel manager to help print copies of our Vietnam visas. He had done an impressive job of teaching himself English from YouTube, and was happy to trade language lessons with us. He hosts foreign English teachers on WorkAway, and we have a standing invitation to return and teach. We stopped on the way out of Nakay for our second pho soup meal of the day. I had thought pho was a Vietnamese thing, and maybe it is, but the Lao versions have been delicious.

We've been eating the tasty pho companion greens with no consequences so far

On the advice of the hotel manager, we stopped by a waterfall on our way back to Gnommalat. The waterfall itself was small, due to the dry season, but the pool at its foot was perfect for mini cliff jumping.

Even better, downstream of the falls an elephant was at work building a bridge! Slowly, with a mahout giving commands from atop his back, he dragged tree trunks across the river on a chain harness, and then scooped them into place laterally with his tusks. When a log snagged on a boulder in the riverbed, he would just pull until the rock rolled over. It was really amazing, and probably a common sight until recent decades.

We ended the day with excellent sticky rice and laab in one of Gnommalat's two restaurants. Jove scrounged in a convenience store for aesthetically worthy cookies, and surprised me (and baffled the restaurant host/cook) with a giant ice cream and cookie sculpture. Overall, our extra day in Laos killing time for visa reasons turned into one of our most fun so far. We were ready to ride to the border the next day, but sad to leave Laos so quickly.

Birthday feast