#konglor cave

[louisetakesphotos]

Hitchhiking back from Konglor Cave in Laos.  Sunset is the best time for photography. Not so good for hitchhiking when you end up stuck on the side of the road in the dark. We ended up sleeping in a local man's house for the night as we couldn't make it back to town. He fed us and gave us mattresses to sleep on. Such a glorious night!

[benandjosbigadventure-blog]

In a scene from Star Trek

Tuesday 26th February

Knowing that the only thing to do in the area was Kong Lor cave we had our 1st lie in in ages. We headed out late morning to the cave. Only 1.5k away so the a pleasant walk in the sun was nice. We arrived paying 4, 000k entry to the park and 110, 000k (roughly £12 total) to hire a long tail boat and 2 guides to take us through the 7.5k river flowing through the cave. We met our guide, nice Lao teenager who didn’t speak any English who took us down, across the river on a bamboo bridge, up and over some rocks into the mouth of the cave. It was 3 storeys high on the inside with a shallow river running through it. We had to wait for some maintenance work to our engine for the boat.

(This kind of thing seems so regular to us now it really didn’t bother us!) And we set off with our guide and maintance man/guide number 2. Now this cave is apparently home to fist size spiders. Whilst this may have been the case, luckily for Jo (and Ben’s ears, we didn’t see any). It’s hard to describe the size and how we felt about the cave because it really was the best we’ve ever seen.

100ft high in some places, mini waterfalls for us and the long tail boat to go down with nothing but torch light to guide us, the sound of rushing water everywhere, endless routes to go squeezing through the cave, pitch black beaches and other boats going in the opposite direction all we could see was their torches. We stopped about a third of the way in to see the stalagmites and stalagtites as well as hollow rocks formed by water. Due to the shear size of it kind of felt like an eery set from star trek.

We reached the other side and had a break at a wooden stall with coke can wind chimes and got a drink before heading back through the cave. 3 hours in total and worth every penny spent to go the wrong way on our route to do it. We clambered out the mouth of the cave into daylight again, said bye to our guides and went for a swim in the clear blue water of the Hinboun river with fish bigger than our feet. Then Jo realised she still had her money belt on with proof of postage for our £40 parcel now soaking wet, whoops! We had Tom Yum chicken soup with a ridiculously generous helping of chicken meat, seriously like 3 chickens worth which tasted awesome and chicken and chips. We chilled back at the hotel, showered for the 1st time in a while and played with the hotel owners 5 year old boy, who couldn’t have been any more cute. We went out for dinner at another hostel and bumped into Louis who we invited over to our table. A very down to earth and real character from Columbia. We had a couple of drinks, exchanged tales and went to bed.