Day 21

Day 22

Meeting up with the girls we got some bicycles. After a bit of hagling I got a girls bike because it had a basket on it. We set off, paying for a toll bridge, we crossed two rivers. The roads then got a bit more nasty. Large puddles, gravelly, rocky, no asphalt. And as my feet were messed up it was fairly hard going. Sanne showed us why the Dutch are known for their bikes as she was breezing through the roads. On the way we met a man who told us not to trust younf men and showed the girls how to arrange thier bags around their handlebars so they couldn't be stolen. He told us on the way back he would give us free pineapple from his garden and tell us a story. So we ventured on and saw a sign that read "Cave and Lagoon" this is what we were after so we headed off down the road. Part way we paid an entrance fee of 10,000 kip, and got to a point where two signs pointed one to the cave and the other to the lagoon. A man then came from his house, and didn't speak a word of English. And to that matter a word of Laos. He was mentally handicapped, I can only assume in the brain... But no matter we weren't here to judge. But it did seem a bit odd as we couldn't see a lagoon and the cave was way up a mountainside "hidden" in the trees. They wanted us to leave our bikes and go up the path to the caves. It really didn't seem right, but the road continued and Sanne and I continued leaving the others behind. Telling Sanne it felt a bit like a Hollywood horror movie, as the area had a some what eerie feel to it. Sliding all over the place as the path was sodden and covered in an algae. We were about to give up when a small child came running over saying "blue lagoon, blue lagoon" and pointing further up the road. Ah, this must be it. We got to the paths end and the kid beconned me to follow him. I went along the paddy field dykes behing him, leaving the others at the bank. The spazzy guy followed closly behind me... The guys were shouting for me to come back as I had gone out of their sight. but I could hear voices ahead near a rock face... Eventually getting to the rock face. The kid pointed into blackness and said in there. I got the weird guy to go in front of me and turned and very quickly walked away. The others had too worked out we had been scammed and we set about leaving as quickly as we could. The weird guy follow closly behind and due to the poor road conditions he could keep up easily. Then a older guy joined the weirdo and he had pretty queer looking eyes. Noticing he had a machette in a sheath behind his back, I thought it best to try and make friends with him. Make things less tense? I kept loosing my flipflops in the muddy puddles so they didn't struggle to keep up. I decided to chat to him in the best Lao I could. Telling him my name, finding out his, something like Umbungo. I then told him we were hungry, we were gunna get some food and come back soon. (To be honest it was a mixture of guesturing, Lao and some English). I was making him laugh and he was patting me on the back. Hopefully this is an international type guesture! Tensions were somewhat eased... At the payment area, Sanne tried complaining, but obviously they couldn't give a rats arse, so she took their rope. Getting back to the road, we then could see the actual tourist sign for the Blue Lagoon. F@@K sake. So we went off to the real one, a ticket man told us to buy a ticket, but we wanted to see if it was the real one or not first. It looked like a cow manure infested brook... Maybe changed because its the rainy season, but to be honest we were fed up by now. The initial guy had said 8,000 kip, but then a woman said it was 10,000 kip. This was even more annoying and Sarah, Johanna and Laurence set off. After a bit more deliberation Sanne and I went off too.

We caught up with the others at the pineapple mans house, just as it started to rain. He then handed us a large plate of pineapple, which he had shouted at his wife to cut up for us. The men aren't lazy here, but it does seem the women do a lot of manual labour, more than us westerners are used to seeing. We found out he had been living in Europe for 30 years and had lived in the jungle of Thailand for 5 years - to learn the monk ways. He told us about his majurwana stories, funny old guy. He took us on a tour of his property and told us to look after our mothers. A really nice man.

Laurence and I then crashed out in a bar overlooking the river and chatted to an OZ for quite a while. He was a chatty sort and as we were tired it was fine listening to his stories. Best line was "So Ive got this young Russian girl emailling me at the moment... lives in some place called krawashankov, somewhere near bloody Moscow." Waiting for the sunset to occur, behind the mountains so I could get a photo. The OZ then described the huts on one of the islands as looking like, "the huts thoughs bloody petrol sniffing, glue sniffing bloody abos have." We made that British noise, the one where you don't really agree with something. And he goes "Nooo, im bloody serious..." Interesting guy... My phone broke because of moisture build up, and decided I had, had enough of today and went off to bed. Larry tried a night out, but shortly joined me.

Day 23

Awoke for brekkie and fancied our last Banana restaurant baguette, but en route was spotted by the girls which was a surprise - as they were suppose to be on a kayaking day. But apparently some people had dropped out. So we sat with them and heard some stories about their night out. The basis of all the stories were around Sarah and her frolicking night, never had sex outside the USA! Yeh right! Sarah was then found by her man and they had a chat. Sarah then announced she would be spending a few days more in Vang Vieng. So four of us headed off to get a bus to Vientiane. We said our fairwells to the Argentinians, Sarah and Rrrrobert. Find there were two bus we could take, we persuaded Sanne to come in the local bus. And it was a nightmare. Cramped, hot and the simple looking bus driver had an insasiable appetite for blowing his horn. His horn was stupidly load and he used it every bloody second of the journey. Humph. Finally in Vientiane the capital of Laos, we shrugged off the hoards of tuk-tuk drivers and found ourselves a place to stay. Enjoying walking around a capital with few hawkers and fairly nice scenery. The girls wanted to go the market... yawn. But after buying something the worker ran after them saying she had got it wrong. But the girls wouldn't budge - with the woman exclaiming "you no good lady." A now often used phrase. Ending up in a 'rooftop" bar, which had no roof... The drinks were a bit dodgy, and we decided to leave. On the way out we could hear noise upstairs. The stupid klutz, had stopped a flight of stairs too early! There was indeed a rooftop bar and it had a good buzz. So we got another drink and Laurence started up the impressions of the special guy from Vang Vieng. With us all doing the impression we laughed the night away.

(Then Sarah's man appeared and swayed her into staying another day (but more likely Vientiane - the capital city of Laos. At the station we could see the local bus waiting in its lot. And night) with him. So we set off Laurence, Sanne, Johanna and myself to get a bus ride to the fairest description I can give of this bus is - dilapidated. Sanne wasn't overly keen on going on this bus, but the other choice was to pay 20,000 kip more and wait for another hour and a half for a "VIP" bus. So local bus it was. The ride was enjoyable to a certain extent. To start with it was incredibly annoying as our peasant bus driver had an insatiable habit of blowing his buses horn - which was cacophony of noise, heinous. Finally leaving the "built up" area of Vang Vieng we headed out into the mountains where there was less people, thus less opportunity for Mr Busdriver to pound his horn. His driving was questionable as we almost wiped out some poor old dear on her bicycle, but we had some amazing views. Just as the ride was getting uncomfortable the bus stopped in the middle of knowhere and the driver said something in Laos and a few people got off. A Western guy (who knew Lao) translated to us and said it was a toilet stop. And then the driver collected our bus fare, presumably as this was a place we couldn't exactly "do-a-runner" from. After about 4:30 hours we arrived in Vientiane, and getting some information from a pesky tuk-tuk driver we decided we could stay the night and grab a bus in the morning to Paxse. Finding a guesthouse that was vaguely cheap (40,000 kip a night), we also discovered the only bus that goes from Vientiane to Paxse leaves at 8 pm. We could have got one that night, but we had paid for our room, so one night and a day seems OK for the capital. We fancied a few drinks and asking some French people they directed us to a bar with a roof top terrace. We found the place, overlooking the Mekong River, but it was lacking the described terrace. Anyhow we grabbed a beer here, which was opened out of site and brought up from downstairs. It tasted a bit funny, and wasn't flowing as well as the beers earlier in the night. We guessed it had been re-filled with draught beer... There wasn't many people in this bar and we got a bit bored, so thought it best to leave and head back to our guesthouse. But on the way out and buzzing atmosphere and entincing music could be heard upstairs. Following the stairs we found out that we hadn't headed up high enough, and there was indeed a rooftop terrace... damn and blast. But it looked good so we had another drink here, but this time cocktails. Sanne as normal ordered something which took a lot of explaining. As the poor Lao woman struggled with our orders which was just "black russian" and "gin and tonic" it was a surprise when she understood what she was saying. Then a few minutes later she came back and said it was too late for them to make Sanne's fruit shake with vodka. At last all with our cocktails, Laurence started doing impressions of the man that was following us around on the bikes from the blue lagoon. In fits of giggles and the rest of us doing impressions, we were chucked out with tears streaming down our faces. A good send off as the girls are off on a slightly different route and we may not see them for quite a while.)