Biking in the rice fields

Today we spent the day biking in the rice fields, surrounded by those beautiful karst mountains, sleepy buffaloes and always so kind laotians.
We snubbed the local travel agencies who ask for a delirious price (yes, 15 dollars is delirious by local standards) to take you in a noisy tuktuk in the quiet rice fields, and rented ourselves bikes to go on our own - by which I mean, without the beer-drinking aussies 9see yesterday's blog). It took us a little bit of work to find bikes on which we didn't knock our knees into our chins, but we finally found some decent mountain bikes and headed towards the other side of the river.

While yesterday night we had used the newly constructed bridge and forded some of it, like locals do (see pic), today we didn't feel like carrying our bikes in the water and took the """ferry""", oh so thin and low sampan (little dinghy) where our bikes almost fell into the water 13 times in 2 minutes and a half.

The scenery all day was amazing, lush vegetation (la "vegetation luxuriante", ca ne vous rappelle rien la famille?), typical Asian scene of farmers working in the rice fields wearing their pointy straw hats.
Vang Vieng is famous for its caves, in the karst mountains, that you can explore with a local guide or with your own flash light.
(emilie) Time to be snubby again: Lao countryside does not look at all like Cambodia, which is endlessly flat (at least not northern laos), but really much more like China, in Guilin, and Vietnam's Halong Bay. So this cave thing might remind something to my dear family with whoim I went exploring caves in the Baie d'Halong (avec ou sans "h", by the way???).

Here's a photo of our fearless guide leading us to the first cave, and then again with Emilie as she waited patiently for the falang to catch their breath after the climb.




(emilie) The caves we saw today were crazy, huge, with all kind of weird shaped stalagtites and stalagmites. Some of them were empty and you could play drums, or rather bong, on them. Brian got all crazy and spent hours taking pictures of every one of them. Luckily for you, pictures are really slow to upload so you might be spared most of them...

(emilie) In one of them that awoke my looming claustrophobia, we snuck into a tiny passage into a cave filled with clear water, and took a short swim into that interior lake. That was a bit of an experience!

(brian) Here's Emilie swimming in the lovely cool pool at the end of the long narrow "slipply" cave. She's fearless.



We stopped for lunch under grilling sun (did I mention it's a little hot here?) (brian) Notice the chiles drying - I spiced my Pho (noodle soup) with last season's chiles and had one of the sweatiest, eye-tearingest, and tastiest meals yet. More cleansing than a sauna.




Then we headed towards the last cave, huge cathedral of stone, with a reclining buddha in the first chamber, and then a humongous, dark, creepy second chamber.

(brian) The cave behind the Buddha cave was immense. Huge. Kept going on and on, each successive chamber extending into invisible dark in each direction, and there were mysterious sounds coming from a few different directions. I felt like the Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria, and like Tom Sawyer in Indian Joe's cave all at the same time. We clambered up and down massive boulders pitted into sharp crannies by long ages of raindrops, I came across roand holes that fell away for at least meters - I don't really know how deep - and I saw stalagmites that I swear were glowing with some kind of luminescence. It was way creepy and exciting at the same time. We probably went in a couple of hundred meters, and we could have gone further. I took a couple of dozen of photos, hoping the flash would light up all that wass beyond my flashlight's reach. But of course it didn't, so I had a couple of dozen black photos, except where I specifically snapped a stalagmite, or where you can see Emilie's headlight in the darkness for scale.

It was a bit of a a climb to get there...
(emilie) Yeah, here's the man climbing up!

...so after that cave we went for the best swim of the day into a gorgeous blue-green lagoon - that's us playing like little monkeys in the water!

And then, well, we were wet (lao people are not so much into bikinis), and it started raining. A good, heavy, monsoon thunderstorm. So we put our ponchos on and biked the 13km back under a wall of rain, in the mud. Unfortuntately we do not have photos of that memorable part of our day - I'm sure it was a funny picture though.
(brian) Riding back in the rain was fun as hell. Reminded me of some of the best of rainy season California, like mud football as a kid, when you could get completely drenched and didn't care and then could just enjoy a world of vertical water and splashing mud. But this was even better, 'cause it was totally warm - no worries about getting cold.


Finally tonight, after some serious drying off we ventured into the backpacker area for an organic vegetarian meal, with mulberry-coco shake (yum!!) and palm sugar beer (mouais). Life's pretty good tonight.