Caves and Tubes, Bikes and Jars

The mountain view from the guesthouse

Vang Vieng was great. The Englishmen (Matt, Scott and Nick) and I visited a small cave just across the river from our guesthouse. Outside the cave, from somewhere within the mountain, a stream of water was pouring out and had created a pool with a swift current. The movement of the water coming out of the mountain was such that you could swim against it at a leisurely pace and not move forward at all. It was fun until I started to let myself drift under a bridge, noticing the giant spider clinging underneath it only after getting uncomfortably close.

The bridge to the cave

The cave, a quick in-and-out with a Buddha inside

The pool outside the cave

The next day, we rented innertubes and got a lift a few miles up the Nam Song river. Along its banks are bar after bar, employees of which will toss you a line with an empty soda bottle at the end for a buoy. Once they pull you in, you stay for a while and drink a beer, maybe swing into the river on a trapeze hung from a 50-foot post, play a little soccer, then grab your tube, hop back in the river and move on to the next spot.

Entering the river

The first bar

From L, Nick, Matt, Scott

The flying trapeze

It's a pretty fun way to spend the day, but when the Englishmen you're with get distracted celebrating Nick's birthday until after the sun goes down, navigating the river's turns and obstacles becomes more intense. After a mile of clinging to each others' tubes, losing one and scraping the odd log in the middle of the river, we decided to paddle to the next sign of civilization on the banks and try our luck on land. The lights we aimed for were a building still a ten minute taxi outside of town, and Matt decided to carry on tubing without announcing it to us. This decision affected us more than we'd anticipated once we realized he had the drybag with our wallets and flip flops, but a pair of Mexicanos fronted us the cab fare back to the tube rental, where we quickly repaid them from our returned tube deposits.

That was enough excitement for me for a day, but the English were not so easily daunted. I retired to the room for the night and, with Nick's laptop, soaked up the unexpected luxury of watching movies in bed. The boys stumbled in, one by one, after a ferocious Laotian downpour struck at about one in the morning. Nick had had seven or eight too many and aroused some animosity in a taxi driver which neither he nor the driver were able to explain to us, but it was such that the driver wouldn't leave the guesthouse without some reparations. Matt took care of the debt, which had the unhappy effect of transfering the driver's animosity to him, and in the resulting brawl between Nick and Matt, one of the room's window treatments tragically lost its life. Order was restored, eventually, and in the wake of excitement, sleep came fast.

I took that, along with the fact that my Vietnamese visa had reached its effective date, as a sign that it was time for me to move on, and left on a bus for Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars the next afternoon.

The bus made its way after dark through switchbacks up the mountains. The view made up for the rattling back-and-forth motion of the swinging coach: under a nearly full moon, as we ascended above the fog, the Laotian lowlands seemed to be submerged under a sea of clouds with mountaintops forming islands. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, and it kept my spirits high throughout the jostling seven hour ride.

The following day in Phonsavan was lost to anxiety and fruitless skype calls to Visa after discovering the local ATMs had no interest in my debit card. I was resigned to waiting until my bank decided to open again and seeing if they would wire me some emergency money, but one final go at the ATMs turned out to be the magic word, and the Kip has flowed unimpeded ever since.

Today was spent on a rented 125cc motorbike, Fekon (Chinese, from the characters etched on the engine), or Fifi for short, exploring the three Plain of Jars sites outside of town. The jars' purpose remains mystery to modern archaeologists, but each one makes a different noise if you slap them with your palm, so my suggestion is, "giant drum kit." Time will tell. The sites, for all their ambiguity, are wonderfully intriguing. and beautiful to boot. The jars range in size from microwave ovens to walk-in closets, and there are probably a hundred or three scattered over the three sites.

Fifi at the entrance to site III

I found myself inexplicably stuck with different songs in my head at each site. In the order I visited them: Site II- "Let My Love Open the Door," Pete Townshend; Site III- "Sophisticated Lady." Rosemary Clooney; Site I- "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work and See My Baby," Tom Waits. Site III was a few minutes' walk on raised paths through rice paddies, and the visit was interrupted by an hour long downpour, which I waited out at a hut beside the entrance with a bowl of chicken and rice noodle soup with crispy fried garlic, green onion, lots of black pepper and a big handful of unidentifiable greens. The chicken was tough, presumably one of the free-range kin of the hens skittering about outside the hut, but the greens and garlic were phenomenal, and the hot broth was revitalizing after the cold rain.

All of the sites are pockmarked with bomb craters from the 'secret war' the U.S. waged on Laos, secret because it was in violation of the official stance of the U.S. that Laos would be neutral during the Vietnam war. Honeywell, it seems, decided those many decades ago that plain old craters wasn't a long enough lasting legacy, so they designed their cluster bombs to be only 70-ish percent efficient. The remaining 30 percent are spread across the country, waiting to be struck by a farmer's hoe or investigated by a curious child before spreading their "Honeywell Howdy." The "Honeywell Howdy" is a euphamism I have given to the exploding and spreading of ball bearings in every direction at thousands of feet per second. The inappropriateness of the phrase doesn't quite match the inappropriateness of the bomb, but it's a start.

In spite of Honeywell's best efforts, the Plain of Jars remains a stunning archaeological phenomenon that I put on par with Angkor Wat and Macchu Pichu. It's made even more alluring by the fact that I was the only person at sites II and III, which is not a statement I could make for Angkor or Macchu Pichu. But after a day's worth of jars and sunburn, I puttered back into Phonsavan and returned Fifi, the Fekon motorbike, and arranged for a taxi to the bus station tomorrow morning, from where I'll be departing to Vinh in Vietnam.