The Loop! (Tha Khaek)

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Hi all!
Thank you so much for all of your emails, it's brilliant to catch up on everyone's news.
We've become seasoned travellers since we last wrote!
The last day we wrote to you all we left Luang Prabang (North Lao) and headed for Tha Khakhek in the South provice. Bit of a mamouth journey: We left at 7.30pm on a local bus to Vientiane, arriving at 5.00am where we immediately caught the next bus to Tha Khaek, finally getting in at 11.30am. Needless to say not much sleep on a journey where they actually hand out sickbags!! Oh yes and the guy next to us had an AK47 machine gun "tucked" under his seat. (We liked to think he was in the army, he seemed friendly enough). We heard stories of nightmarishly loud karaoke blaring out from the tv screens on the buses stopping any chance of sleep. We thanked our lucky stars when we got on as there was not tv! Then 10 minutes into the journey the ticket man pulls out his mobile phones, yes phones, and plays beautiful Lao melodys on them at full volume aghhh! Ben was going to have a word but as he was best friends with the man holding the gun, thought better of it.

When we did finally arrive, shattered (and a little queezy) in Tha Khaek we went straight to Tha Khaek Lodge, a hostal renowed as a base camp for those setting out on "The Loop", which is a route some people take to get of the beaten track and see some of the remoter parts of the Khammuan and Bolikhamsai Provinces.
We planned our journey by motorbike, a close to 500km round trip, more than a little worried at how sore our bums would be by the end of it! We ended up drawing our own map, taking lots of bits an pieces from other peoples travel log in the hostal.

We got up really early and set off, though the kind man who loaned us the bike left us barely enough fumes in the tank to get to the petrol station. We set off east on Route 12, and stopped off at Tha Falang, a really nice swimming spot, after working our way through a really friendly village.
We made our way down the red and really dusty road with sunglasses on and kikoys and sarongs wrapped around our heads, - setting off fashion trends around the world!
We stopped briefly at a famous cave, but Hannah threw a wobbly over having to pay twice (about 25p) so we didin't go in. Hehe! I think we were pretty "caved-out" anyway!
Even though these roads were appauling the scenery was stunning. We were driving through the valley of mountains, with paddy fields, pigs, cows, goats, buffaloes all over the place! Even beeping the horn did little good trying to get them out of the road. After about 5 hrs.... we came to a sudden stop!
Ben looked down and saw a pathetic excuse for a tyre and we knew we were in a spot of bother, to put it mildly.
We knew we were half way between villages/towns, but were unsure if the town we were heading to would have a repair shack or if it was just Nakai that we had passed.
There was man fixing his truck on the side of the road, and out came the South-East Asia phrase book, - thank you Call Connections (Hannah's work)!!!
Despite being fluent in Lao, we were unable to really convey the nature of our situation, all he wanted to do was get into his hammock that was hanging between 2 wheels of his truck!
We eventually decided to head back to Nakai as we had seen a few tyre repair places there and set about trying to flag a pick-up down. Fortunately the first one we tried stopped and reversed back. The 2 friendly Laos helping Ben load the bike on to back and head off back to Nakai luckly on 10 kms away on very bumpy track!
It didn't take long, and only $2 to fix, then we were back on the road again. 20kms later we arrived at Tha Lang, where we decided to stay the night, and missed torrential rain (& hail!) by a matter of minutes.

The next day, just when we thought the roads couldn't get any worse, did exactly that. We went the wrong direction for a couple of kms before some friendly bridge workers put us back on track. A couple of hours down the road we hit arrived at a huge JCB still finish/repairing the "road".
He pointed to a separate track alongside, so we backtracked a bit and went down this track that can only be described as tonnes and tonnes of mud! Not the best surface for scooter motorbike. Luckily we made it through without being totally covered head to toe in mud!
The road took us through some stunning scenery high up into the mountains and down again the otherside where we stopped for lunch in Lak Sao and then headed for Ban Na Hin on our first stretch of tarmac!! Wahoo!
We spent the night in a really nice guesthouse where we they had steaks! Definately weren't expecting that sort of food! They had 2 pet monkeys, which Ben fell in love with and just wanted to attack Hannah. They were great value, we just wanted to play with them all night. We got an early night after the biggest lizard shat on Ben from great height. Not impressed. Now no clean clothes, and very,very smelly.

The next day we made our way to the famous Kong Lor cave a 7km undergournd limestone cave! The only way to see it was through chartering a boat through it.
We set off down another dirt track, this time much better than the others. We passed through several villages with lots of kids coming out of the huts shouting "Saibadee, saibadee!" (Hello!). Waving frantically with great big smiles! It was brilliant! Even the monks were getting involved!
Then we came to another standstill. The road stopped at where a bridge that was once there a couple of days ago, now had been washed away. There were 3 planks on our side. It looked exactly like the setting of what we imagine a team-building exercise would look like. "Now cross from here to there without touching the bottom!"

We set about laying the planks out to try and cross the gulley on a very makeshift bridge. Fortunately for us there were some workers on a proper bridge nearby that came over to help us, and the 3 of them and Ben managed to get the bike down and up the other side. If it wasn't for them we wouldn't have made it across.
20kms of more gulleys but thankfully no more bridge-building later we arrived at the caves where we were hurried into a village and then someone's home for the tour! Ben went with one of the guys on the bike (to stop him running off with it!), leaving Hannah with 10 children just staring at her. Not the usual, happy Saibadees we'd been used to!
Fortuantely we were off soon with 2 "guides". The river was stunning on the way to the caves. We passed more villages out washing their clothes and playing around, fishing in the river.
The cave was huge! There were parts that you couldn't even see the ceiling. There were caves leading into caves, it was vast!
There were several times we had to get out of the boat and pull it up over rapids inside the cave. Hard work.
We stopped off briefly whilst we were shown some of the huge stalagtites, stalagmites, columns that were just huge!
It was quite a long tour, and we had a few complications the other end in that they didn't want to take us back to the start, but after an hour and half, we did a lot of huffing and puffing and they took us all the way back through the caves! Now that was an adventure!
We then drove back to the guesthouse we stayed at before. It was a stunning ride at the sun was setting, lots of children running round, splashing around, buffaloes doing the same in the sticky stuff, and lots more Saibadees! We got back shattered from all the shouting of hellos!

The following day we set off back to Tha Khaek (where we started). It was a pretty long ride and fortunately most of it on paved roads. That said we passed some brilliant views along the way, getting very, very wet by the rain. Until then we'd had a lot of luck with the weather.
That afternoon despite being shattered, for some reason we thought it would be a "sensible" idea to catch a local bus to Pakse. We got the 5.00 bus and the 6hr bus journey took us 8 hours! So we didn't arrive until 1.00am. Not the best time to check into a guesthouse. Our driver deserted us for 15 minutes when we got there, and everyone seemed content with sleeping on the bus for the remainder of the night. Luckily he went to fetch a tuk-tuk, and we head the 7km into town. After several failed attempts at waking up guest-house owners, the driver took us to a hotel, where we gratefully checked in.
Now we're today, the 30th and just planning what we'll be doing in and around Pakse before heading down to 4000 islands. We've only got until the 11th of June on our visa, so need to plan it all quite carefully as we love it here.
Sorry about the essay, but we're still very excited about the little adventure we've just been on! By now I'm sure you've all learn how to skim read our emails!
Our plan is to try and set up a travel-blog thing, a website where we'll copy all these emails on to it and we can put some pictures on next to some of the days. It sounds pretty good and we're going to give it a go tonight. We'll send you the link when we've managed to get it all working.
Lots of love to you all,
Hannah and Ben
xxxxxx

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