Into the Wild: Around Tha Khaek and the Bolaven Plateau

To backtrack to a more innocent time, before lost passports and days spent hanging around the police station, you might recall we were heading south on the 7am bus yo a famous cave, which you can travel through on a boat. We missed the bus by 5 mins, and as there wsn't another till the next day, decided to head to a small town in the south called Th Khaek instead. As we later found out the cave is home to the world's biggest spiders (!!!) perhaps it was for the best....
          Tha Khaek is a nice little place but there's very little to do in the town itself. However, it was fated to become the site of an epic battle, known to history forevermore as the Motorbike Dispute. Many people use Tha Khaek as a base for exploring the surrounding countryside, dominated by limestone crags and peppered with caves. The most popular way of doing this is by motorbike. Now, while cars are relatively rare in SE Asia, at times it seems literally everyone has a motorbike. I've seen children who by law in Britain would have to sit on a booster seat in the car driving them, as well as four or five people riding the same one, usually with a baby right up at the handlebars. Helmets and leather protective gear are as rare as snowflakes. It starts to seem so normal and looks so easy that it's unsurprising Dave was seduced, and suggested we rent one. As I like my limbs more or less intact I suggested bicycles instead. The 'discussion' was...lengthy, but in relationships it's generally not the done thing to force someone into activities which terrify them, so I ultimately me and my fear won the day.

 We rented bikes and headed off on the 35km round trip of the main caves in the area. The heat was brutal, and the area so untouristy that most of the caves were not signposted and proved virtually impossible to find. We never got to the first one we looked for, but found instead a tiny village full of pigs and chickens. We cycled through it followed by clouds of red dust - children came running from the bamboo huts to shout "Sabaidee! Sabaidee!" (Hello) after us, and sometimes to run down the road after us.
          
The second cave proved equally unreachable, but we met three Japanese guys and an English girl from our hostel, coming from the opposite direction on motorbikes. They shared their juice with us and said they'd had problems finding the other caves too. As we set off, they looked doubtfully at us, down the long road ahead, and said "Maybe you should have got motorbikes...."

We carried on down the road and found a little wooden sign for one of the caves we had been searching for. We cycled down a dirt track, followed by some children from a nearby house. The way to the cave was a barely visible, overgrown path through thick scrub and trees. One of the boys took pity on us and ran ahead to show us the way, which involved walking across a fallen tree trunk over the river. (Above.) That isn't usually the kind of thing that freaks me out, but with my knees threatening to give way after one step, I was reduced to crawling across it, watched in silence by about ten Lao boys playing in the river.

After checking out the cave and a bit of paddling in the stream, our guide - called Sala - took us back by a different route, presumably out of deference to my cowardice. On the way we saw pineapples growing wild among the bushes, which was cool - David has a picture on his facebook. Back at our bikes, we gave Sala 10000 kip for his services as tour guide, because we'd probably still be there looking for the cave if we'd tried to find it ourselves. We cycled on a bit further, met a mysterious Irish biker who directed us on a detour, then headed back to our guesthouse to sit around the campfire.

 

The next day we arrived in Pakse, where the Unfortunate Event happened. I'll skip over that to talk about about the organised day trip we went on to kill time while the police were taking the weekend off. Along with two Germans and a French couple we visited the Bolaven Plateau, an area of virtual wilderness, where much of the world's Arabica coffee is grown. First stop was a coffee and tea plantation, followed by no less than three waterfalls and a minority village. It was a nice day but I definitely prefer the freedom of doing day trips ourselves even if that means spending half the time wandering around lost. We've travelled even further into the wilderness at the moment and will stay here and lounge on hammocks for a couple of days before crossing the border to Cambodia...