Vang Vieng 06/03/06

Having an absolute ball here in Vang Vieng, spelunking, white water rafting, kayaking, it all happens here, complete with a test match on the telly in my favourite Indian restaurant, India vs England. The local kids love playing in the river out the front of my bungalow, unfortunately not quite close enough to photograph but fortunately close enough to enjoy.

I have not yet killed myself while bouncing off rocks in a rubber tube traveling at stupid speeds down rapids, (I can now sympathise with those balls in pinball machines), and all this with the advantage of having your bum emersed in chilly water the entire time! Capsizing kayaks has become a specialty. For some obscure reason that has yet to become apparent to me, no-one will leave you in charge of a kayak till you have proved that you can both spin the thing and flip it. I have only superficial wounds after slipping down the sides of several caves, the water in said caves is often freezing, apparently some tourists like to swim in it?!? I was under the obviously false impression that the earths core was warm! The caves often have Buddah statues in them and stalagmites and tites that someone with an overactive imagination once upon a time thought looked like an elephant or a monkey or perhaps a rabbit in the moon.

It's amazing how much the inside of a cave is just how I imagine the surface of the moon to be, except of course that it tends to be damp and drippy in parts and of course the surface of the moon is apparently dry (if it wasn't it would be like the surface of the earth and not like a cave floor at all, hmmm, perhaps I should give up while I am ahead on this one.).
I was at this cave the other day, most of the caves here are in the sides of cliffs but this one was in a kind of free standing rock and when I walked around the rock it had all these groovy little small caves (not mentioned in the guide books) some had buddah images, and others had general detritus of faith, incense stick bases and melted wax from candles, etc, very cool indeed. Now if this was in my home town the detritus would probably be empty beer bottles (possibly broken) and used condoms. (Perhaps because the river here is so like the Hutt, this random thought occured to me).

The weather has really heated up today, it has been quite chilly up till now in Lao, but today was pretty hot, it's amazing how the temperature drops as soon as that sun hides behind the great karst out crops that make the odd mountain silhouettes behind my bungalow.

The dogs in Lao are all surprisingly fit and healthy and remarkably mange free compared with the dogs in Thailand, I guess unwanted puppies are disposed of rather than left to roam and fend for themselves. Mind you there was this one particular dog outside a bank in Lumphini (where we were staying in Thailand) who was so fat, he just slept all day and all night at the top of the stairs of the bank, occasionally he would lumber down to street level to relieve himself, (though the effort of lifting his leg to pee would often prove too much like hard work half way through) food was delivered to him there on the stairs and I can only hope that this is not the banks idea of a security dog.

There is a herd of marauding water buffalo who like to wander past my bungalow a couple of times a day which would all be terribly rustic and wonderfully authentic (other expressions of touristic and cultural snobbery may be substituted here if you don't like those I have chosen) if they didn't piss me off so much by crapping around my bungalow making my late night trips to the bathroom an obstacle course, I wonder if they would respond to soda bottles full of water strategically parked around the place, I could teach the people of Lao how to make their "yards" appear more like suburban lawns across the western world.

Did I mention that Lao is positively adrift with butterflies and dragonflies, there seem to be clouds of them continually floating up out of paddy fields drifting languidly past just to find a new resting place a foot or so further on. It's fantastic they are so bright and colourful.

While on the subject of wildlife my bungalow has a pet lizard, and I don't mean a little gecko, it's quite a large lizard, I rather like this it keeps the mosquito level low, but I worry for the life of the cricket who has rather recklessly just wandered in!
Anyway I'm going to have a nap in my hammock, catch y'all on the flip side.
N.J.