Kong Lor Cave

My pictures won't convince you and neither will my description but Kong Lor Cave is one of the most incredible places I have ever been in my life!

We had assumed, wrongly, that songthaews to Kong Lor Cave would leave regularly but they only leave three times a day unless you want to buy a whole songthaew for 300,000 LAK ($37.50), we opted to wait an hour and go with everyone else for 25,000 LAK ($3.13). Typical for Southeast Asia transport, after picking us up the songthaew stopped to get gas and I shot this video of a silly monkey who was doing this over and over again:

The rest of the ride was much as I described yesterday in my Off the Beaten Path entry. When we were one kilometer away from Kong Lor Cave the songthaew stopped and the driver told us to get out there. We argued with him that we wanted to go to the main part of the town and not to be dropped one kilometer from it.

When we got to the Kong Lor Cave, there was no town, the only semblance of a town was where the driver had tried to drop us. So we grabbed our bags and dragged them one kilometer back and found a guesthouse to stay at. We quickly dropped our bags and headed back to the caves.

Before going to the caves this is what I knew: the caves run for seven kilometers (4.3 miles) through a mountain along a river. On the other side of the river are two villages that can only be accessed either by taking a boat through the caves or by helicopter.

We walked to the river and paid for a ticket into the caves, which includes a guided tour on a boat. We got life jackets and boarded a skinny wooden boat with two young Laotian guys as guides. As soon as you look up the river you see a rush of water pouring out of the mouth of the cave and down some serious rapids. I couldn't believe that these two guides were going to row us, by hand, up these rapids and into the mouth of the cave.

The guides had no intention of rowing the boat up the rapids, they simply rowed across the river to the other side where we were able to walk up some rocks to the mouth of the cave, where there were no rapids and boats with motors. The guides went and got their motor from the selection of stored motors sitting on the rocks.

The guides hooked up the motor to a small wooden boat, that was identical to the first boat we were on and then we hopped in. Inside of the cave it was pitch black so we all had headlamps or flashlights to see. The cave varied in both width and height as we went through. The height went from only a few feet above my head to several hundred feet.

When we were about a third of the way through the cave the guides pulled over on an island and led us around to an area where there were lights hooked up to see amazing displays of stalagmites and stalactites.

The driver must have had the cave memorized because he could navigate it so effortlessly when it was nearly impossible to see and there were several hairpin turns. When we reached the other side we were greeted by sunshine and limestone cliffs. We stopped to have a drink at a small stand run by one of the local villages and then took the boat back through the cave to the other side.

What made it so surreal to me was the massive size of the cave combined with the feeling that I was on a boat in complete darkness 3.5km's inside of a mountain. It was impressive, it was beautiful and exhilarating. I can't explain really why it made such a positive impression on me, but I remember thinking "All of the trouble to get here was so worth it, this is so incredible!"

Here are the rest of the pictures from today: