We left Phonsavan in the early hours and drove the 6 hour journey to a very wet Vang vien. We went out for a meal and a couple of drinks but found ourselves having a much needed early night. The following day we got up and decided to hire bikes and go for a short cycle to some nearby caves which had lagoons to swim in. The caves were only 6km away so we gave ourselves plenty of time for relaxing in the pools. We followed the signs towards the caves and found ourselves cycling through some pretty muddy tracks, the mud in some places literally stopped our bikes, so all we could do is push. We then came across this big river in which we needed to cross, there was a bridge but, it was broken and the banks were extremely steep and muddy. Chris attempted to cycle down the bank and failed unsurprisingly, so the rest of us decided our best bet would be to lock the bikes up and walk the rest of the way. Knee deep in mud, literally, we slowly made our way across the river and made our way through even more mud, when we came to the same road we had taken a turning off. To save ourselves having to cycle the entire way we had cycled through prior, we decided it would be quicker to go back and get the bikes across the river. So this time we crossed the river, knee deep in mud, with our bikes!! To get to the road we then had to lift our bikes over 2 fences and through a field of evil Laos cows!! We eventually made it to the road (this having taken about 3 hours!!) We then decided to ignore the sign we had turned off for towards the caves and see if we could find another way. We then found ourselves a a T junction with both ways having signs to the cave. We stopped to discuss which sign looked more believable, it got down to the point where we were discussing handwriting and the colour paint used!! At this point I had stopped on my bike and put my bare foot in the evil Laos cows poo and had lost all interest in the sodding caves. We eventually got to the caves and decided to go explore the Buddhas inside. We followed the signs and literally found ourselves climbing the rock face of this cave in very wet and slippery conditions, it was really quite scary. When we got in the cave and saw the buddha we were all amazed. The 4 hour bike ride (including the very muddy 3 hour detour) and risking our lives climbing into the cave we were faced with this... the smallest crappiest buddha in the whole entire world, if we had had the energy we would have cried. The climb down from the cave was even worse than climbing up and by the time we reached the bottom our legs had turned to jelly. We looked at the time and realised we only now had 40 mins to get our bikes back! We managed to convince a tuk tuk driver to take us and our bikes (yes we could have just got a tuk tuk to the cave!) The tuk tuk was however, a tractor and trailer which went even slower than us cycling! Some how we made it back in time and when the woman received our bikes back she just laughed, god knows what she thought we'd been up to. That evening we chilled out in a bar and watched family guy. (all the bars our here play either family guy or friends its a bit creepy)