Vang Vieng and quickly down South in Laos

The next stop off in Laos was Vang Vieng - a town renowned as the capital for the artful sport of tubing. This, for those unfamiliar with the term, involves sitting in an inflated rubber tube and floating down a river. It's not a very difficult sport.

Tubing begins with you renting out a tube and being given a lift 3km up stream. The government has taken away most of the rope swings and slides into the rocky shallow water due to people breaking themselves, so the trip downsteam is apparently a lot more serene than it used to be. In fact it's about the most relaxing way to spend a sunny afternoon. You can break up the serene by mooring at bars along the way to discuss tubing tactics with fellow tubers and have a game of bowls or basketball.

In the tubing

As the day winds down and you approach the town there is a section of rapids where a crudely scrawled "End of Tubing" sign stands next to a restaurant. Trying to disembark here may result in you falling on rocks, losing a flip-flop and flailing desperately for your life. This happened to us. Tubing was super.

Still in the tubing

The scenery around Vang Vieng is really quite something, with huge limestone rocks jutting out of the ground and a scattering of caves and pools. We hired a couple of mountain bikes to explore and headed out towards "The Blue Lagoon", known for it's azure pools of loveliness - but again we were duped by a crudely drawn fake sign to a tiny blue-ish lagoon where a lovely but unwanted Laos guide led us to a nearby cave in flip-flops and without a flashlight. Our concern grew as he slid off rocks in the dark and we decided to instead visit nearby "Nam Borkeo Phaboua Cave" by ourselves. Here was a clear swimming pool full of impossible to catch fish, some crazy stalagmites like something out of the film Alien and some terrifyingly large, and even more terrifyingly fast, spiders crawling about in the pitch black humidity.

Caving and whatnot

Being in a town surrounded by big rocks also made us fancy a climb, so we booked a day of top-rope climbing on Sleeper Wall, which is basically two cliffs which face each other and shade each other from the sun. We ended up doing 8 climbs of increasing difficulty with a helpful Laos guide who would encouragingly shout tips such as "Left foot to right hand" and "Right foot above your head" before chuckling wildly. He was actually reasonably trustworthy though and encouraged a Canadian vs English climb-off - not a victory for the English thanks to my inability to get my left foot to my right ear.

The sleeping wall

The town is a great place to relax in the evening as well, but our visas were running out so we got a bus South to the capital Vientiene and applied for a week's extension. The process took a day longer than expected, and we couldn't find much to do in the big city so we moved on quickly.

Vientiane getting ready for Christmas

On the way South we were wanting to see Konglor Cave, a vast 7.5km cavern system which can only be explored by a boat on a river that runs under a mountain. We had missed the first bus of the day due to the visa extension so instead got a later bus to the town of Tha Khaek, asking the driver to drop us off at the only crossroads en route (Laos has few roads so crossroads are rare). Here we stood looking helpless until a taxi picked us up to take us to Ban Nahin (also confusingly known as Ban Khoun Kham) which is an hour from the cave.

The road there was cold. However, to cheer us up there were rows upon rows of Jurassic hills covered in mist which didn't get photographed due to the aforementioned chilliness. This village was the least developed we've visited yet, with no wifi and very few English speakers. As usual for Laos everyone was super friendly, with one restaurant owner making me take some free plasters when he noticed, with horror, that I'd bandaged my split thumbnail with electrical tape.

The next day we hired some awful piece of Chinese engineering they were passing as a moped, and tried to head to Konglor cave. At first we made the mistake of asking directions from a non-English speaking shopkeeper who did the Thai/Laos thing of pointing down any road and nodding (this is at least the third time it's happened to us). After following this track for a half an hour we thought we should double check, and upon asking another local I was laughed at (in the kindest way you can be laughed at) and pointed back down the road we'd come from.

Anyway, we eventually found the cave an hour and a half away down some mud roads and paths and past lots of "Sabaidee!" shouting smiling children. We paid for a guide and a longtail boat and set off.

It's really, really big in there. All you can hear is dripping water and the boat engine. The headtorches barely reach to the ceiling in the high parts and the rock is twisted into some obscure apparitions around you. The guides were constantly adjusting trajectory for dangers in the water, and at points got out to push the boat up small waterfalls and rapids! We walked a dryish section of it which they've fitted with Doctor Who lighting to emphasize the weirdness. The scale of the cave is quite crazy. After emerging at a Lost World like scene on the other side of the mountain we had a little snack then headed back for a slightly faster run. Here the Laos guys laughed heartily as we splashed down mini rapids in the fragile longtail boat and took us under low shelves at health and safety breaking velocity. Fun for everyone!

Konglor Cave

Then it was unfortunately a big transit day to Pakse. Starting with a four hour freezing tuk tuk ride to Tha Khaek, we arrived at the bus station just as the seven hour bus for Pakse was leaving. We reacted with cat like ferocity and were on the bus lickety split. Luckily it stopped for food about an hour in as we had eaten nothing all day - so we had a bag of sticky rice, a papaya and some coffee coated peanuts. You don't forget a meal that grand.

Pakse was just a town for us to get some planning done. It's obviously the town where the money is in Laos as everything costs more and, well, there are a lot of banks. There's not much to do in the town itself but it's a major gateway town to Southern Laos. It was a surprisingly nice place with some cool architecture. After a day we raced further on South to get to the 4,000 islands in time for Christmas and to get out of Laos before those pesky visas expired.

- Jon

Pakse looking all nice