Caving

Yesterday we got a transfer from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. Sometimes we have been prebooking accommodation online when there is a good deal or a place has really good reviews. We did this in Vang Vieng and when we checked into our accommodation it was nothing like what we had expected. The back door was a sliding glass door that over looked the river but the only way to close it was to pull it towards you on one side while simultaneously pushing it left and pushing the lock down. The bed was resting on a piece of cardboard that was covered in 1/4 of an inch of dirt. The ceiling was a drop in ceiling and several of them were missing so we could look out over the wall into the hallway. We asked the manager if there was another room we could move to and were told that the hotel was completely booked up. We showed the manager the room and immedietly he agreed to upgrade us to another room at a sister property, a beautiful bungalow overlooking the river.

This morning we had to change accommodation as we had only booked one night in advance and the upgraded room was out of our price range for this trip. Our new room isn't too great either but at least the doors close and I can't see into the hallway.

We rented motorbikes again but this time rented one each. Several of the places in town only rented manual transmission bikes and we wanted automatic so we had to scour the town to find anywhere that had automatics. We found a place that only had 1 automatic but when I tried to drive the manual, I was a bit rough and the company went and got a second automatic bike from somewhere else. These bikes are by far the worst bikes we have rented the entire time we have been in Southeast Asia. The speedometers and gas gauges don't work. My motorbike doesn't have rear mirrors and if you let the bike idle it dies which meant that I had to constantly restart it as I was driving on the road.

We drove the motorbikes through an abandoned airstrip that was used during the Vietnam War to the gas station before heading out towards a place called "The Blue Lagoon". You have to drive across a small wooden toll bridge and then along a dirt road. The drive to The Blue Lagoon was amazing with rice fields on all sides and giant limestone cliffs not too far in the distance. The pictures do not accuretly depict how breathtakingly beautiful the drive was.

The Blue Lagoon is made up of two parts a cave and a wide section of the river. First we headed up to the cave by climbing rocks for about 15 minutes to the side of a cliff that opened into a large cave. The cave opened to a giant chamber with two openings, that shone light in, and a buddha statue.

With much maneuvering around the slippery rocks we were able to see stalagmites and stalactites. We continued further into the cave, there are no guides or paved walkways, to another large chamber that was really dark. We wandered around for a while, climbing over and around rocks, anywhere we wanted to go, it was really amazing.

After we were all kinds of tired and sweaty we headed back out into the rain and back down the steep side of the mountain to the base where the river was. There is a large tree with rope swings and jumping platforms that we played around on for a while. Janelle and I both jumped off the lower set of branches and watched a some locals jumped off of the top.

Vang Vieng is a really interesting place, it is built entirely for tourists and wasn't much of a town at all before the Lonely Planet people did a write up of the town that drove tourists here by the thousands to enjoy the scenery and go tubing, we are doing that tomorrow. All of the restaurants in town are full of pillows to sit on and everyone sits on the floor and eats and drinks while watching DVD's of Friends or Family Guy.

There isn't a lot of culture in Vang Vieng, but it sure is a great place to chill out.

Check out all of today's pictures in the slideshow below: