July 15th, 2012
Meh….. : / July 15th part II
Hey everyone….just like I said….here is the rest of the day….
We had breakfast…4th day in a row of crepes and fruit…I am ok with it…but Troy is so ready for something new (how about eggs and toast?–we only had that for 11 straight days before the crepes started)!! Hahahahahahahaha
Anyway…we decided to take tuk tuk to the caves instead of the boat trip….only because…uh…ok, not sure why….but we did.
So I would give these caves a 2.5/5 rating….I think if I had never been to a cave…I might have been all over it…but we have seen some magnificent caves in Thailand over the last few years…so I had high expectations…and was kinda disappointed. We used the same driver we hired to take us to the waterfalls a few days ago…so it was great that his English is very good and he could explain lots of things to us…
We had to take a very short boat ride across the Mekong river as the caves are on the other side. A father/son team took us over…the boy looked about 10 (and very capable!)
Once we got there….there were the lower caves and the upper caves. We decided lower caves first as “upper” sounded like a climb was involved and we were putting that off.
The thing to note in these caves is that there are over 2,500 little Buddha statues in the lower caves and over 4,000 in the upper. Over time, people have brought them here and left them as part of their worship.
After the lower caves were explored…that only left the upper caves…stopped part way up for a breather. The sign said it was a 61 meter climb (almost 200 feet)! Sure felt like more in the blazing sun ; )
After we left there….we went to a paper making shop…this is very cool process and all done by hand of course.
Starts with the lady who boils the tree bark in an old oil drum…
Then that gets ground up with a huge mortar and pestle. Then they float that goop on a screen in a water bath and this is when they put the little leaves or flowers or whatever they are working with that day. Today was grass fronds.
Then they pull them out to dry in the sun for 4 or 5 hours.
We also went to a whiskey village…they make and sell Lao Lao whiskey. It has to be the nastiest concoction on the planet. They put snakes, scorpions and other nasty things in the bottle…they will give you a free sample. We passed on that…thank you very much…But we did wander the other shops and when we were coming out….we saw a group of young people taking the samples. 2 gals and 2 guys. I was like REALLY? People take the samples?? Then they had a second….I am not sure how that ended up as we got back in our tuk tuk and left. Too much for me!
We had asked our driver to take us to see the grave of Henry Mahout. I won’t bore you with the history of this as it is not the most interesting thing…I have something far more fascinating…but the quickie history lesson is he was a dude from France who came over to SE Asia (specifically Cambodia) and discovered the buried, hidden and overgrown Angor Wat back in the mid 1850s. He did a bunch of drawings and maybe even some photos and then went back to France to share his discovery. He should have left well enough alone…but he didn’t and he decided to come back to see what else there was. He got as far as Luang Prabang and he got malaria and died. So here he rests.
We had to hike along the Nam Khan river for about 10 minutes to get to the gravesite…it is just tucked in among the trees on the riverside.
Now for the real story ; )
Our driver said something about the road “not being very good” to get to the site. So we thought…ok maybe a little rough, potholes or some such thing. Ok…the whole road was under construction it was a tear down…like in the USA, the whole thing would be closed for a year. But they just let the cars through here…the equipment pulls out of the way and the cars, bikes, motorbike, pedestrians, whatever…just goes through and then they resume the work. I took some pictures…it was crazy!
It’s like they are just carving a whole new road into the side of this mountain, and life just goes on around it.
Plus they are building all the gutters by hand. They lay the stone and then pour concrete of top to set it.
Jackie is heading back to Woodinville today and Rachael tomorrow….so will be anxiously awaiting to hear how they are doing ; ) shout out to the grandparents for each taking one of them and keeping them safe and happy for this long!!
Apologizing in advance for lame blog entry tomorrow…it is our travel day to Vang Vieng, so prolly won’t be much to report…unless there is ; )) who knows…every day IS an adventure and you just never know what will happen. We are taking the VIP bus, so that sounds good doesn’t it??????
TTFN
Laurie
