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Published: February 9th 2011
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Kong- Lo Cave, Village home stay and the most amazing 4000 Islands!
Where to start.............. the past 2 weeks have been incredible! We decided to head south through Laos and try and get to the Kong-Lo Caves which at first seemed impossible to get to but actually were a pretty easy bus ride! Everyone in Vientiane made the journey seem extremely complicated but with a bit of help from the web we decided to take a chance and catch an early morning bus and hope that we would get there (which we did)! We arrived in a little town called Ba Na Hin which is the nearest point from which to get to the cave, we stayed here the night and then headed to the cave the next morning. The cave was out of this world, it was like some Indiana Jones Adventure film! It is 7.5 km of darkness, with just your torch for comfort (Mercers – if you are reading this the torch came in extremely handy!) You stop half way through and can marvel at the stalagmites and stalactites which are incredible. It is so scary at parts though, I don’t know how the drivers do it,
I kept think we were going to crash into the rocks but they knew the cave like the back of their hand, you have to just trust them completely! We would definitely recommend the cave, so many travelers miss it out though, it is criminal!
After the cave we decided to try a village home-stay in a local village, Kong- Lo which was interesting to say the least! None of the family spoke English but luckily we found a Lao – English dictionary so we spent hours trying to speak in broken conversation! The house was made entirely out of wood and on stilts and we stayed in their main communal area with a bed sheet sectioning it off to signify our bedroom. The funniest part was the food! After about half an hour we were greeted by a group of girls who brought with them some berry type things for us to try, however they were vile and we had to sit eating them with fake smiles on our faces! Then for dinner we had so much food. Rikki had about 5 peoples worth of rice to himself, 5 times the size of my rice portion (they obviously think
that women don't eat much) and then we had cabbagey soup stuff with a few fish plonked in- eyes, tails and fins intact! We struggled for ages eating it, trying to remove fish bones that were so soft they just broke in your fingers but we couldn't finish it all! We learnt the Lao word for delicious so we kept telling them how amazing it was to be polite but that backfired when the next morning we woke to find that they had cooked us exactly the same for breakfast plus an egg! It was even harder the second time round to eat it! To make it worse we were meant to be getting a 6am bus but we felt we couldn't leave after they had started cooking so we ended up sticking around and didn't leave until half 7! They were a really lovely family though and the daughter performed some ritual thing where she tied cotton to our wrist and placed an egg and a lump of rice into our hands and told us to eat, apparently it means good luck and that they enjoyed our company!
We have run out of time to write about the
islands but will post soon!
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