Laos Expedition - Day 7 Kong Lor Caves

It actually gets me quite excited to see all the boats lined up like this all waiting to go into the water. For the day, we need to paddle upstream to the Kong Lor cave, a straight-line distance of 8km away on the GPS. The guide and the resort staff actually told us it's about 5km away, but you should never trust the time/distance approximation of people living in 3rd world countries apparently - for all their kindness, they do have a warped sense of distance and time (everything seems near and fast to them).

A proper picture of my sail's mast base. I got this design from a forum member on the folding kayak forum, and it was just perfect for the purpose. For the day, i had this idea of strapping the mounting pipe of the Brightstar together with the 2 masts so that it will be solidly propped up with no chance of wobbling, and I thought it was such an eureka moment for me when I thought of the idea. My teammates should really learn how to pay compliments...

Launching off was a little slow cos we had to do it one by one. Great scenery, don't you think so?

We set off enthusiastically, and we had a good average speed of 4.5km/h, but it was actually tough going. There were a lot of areas where the water was very shallow, and we had to go left and right avoiding all those areas or risk getting grounded.

This river seems to support a much larger population, and there were such farming plots all along the river. The villagers will dig shallow holes in a grid within their area and each hole will have a clump of vegetable in it.

There are patches with large patches of this underwater vegetation all around, I wonder if they are edible...

This is the type of attention we get when we go by the villages. Hordes of children will just run over to the river bank to receive us, just to say hi and bye. It seems that many of them do not attend school, and our guide told us that they only learn English for an hour every week. By the way, our excellent replacement guide for this river, Soonthone, speak really fluent English, and it seems to me that having a mastery of the language really helps people get good jobs in third-world countries.

Fantastic rest spot, with shade and great scenery.

There are lots of ducks around the river, but then we had never seen it featured on any menu in Laos! We asked the guide, who said that Laotians do eat duck, but they think it's too tough to serve to tourists. I guess they are not really good at cooking it. Mindy says she's swearing off ducks after taking too many photos of them, especially the fluffy pure white ones.


The overhanging bamboo tree made me think of paddling in China too. At this point of time I vividly recall thinking about what nice food we can have if we were to paddle there...

Ok eventually we got really tired. It was our slowest trip ever. Instead of 8km indicated on the GPS unit, we eventually had to travel a solid 20km through the meandering river. A tourist staying at the same resort who had went up to the cave on the longtail boat passed us on her way back, saying that it was "not far ahead", but we were too tired of hearing that to really believe it, not wanting to raise our hopes.

We arrived! There was a small bridge across the river which serves as a gate, and we had to paddle through it before we saw the rapids at the mouth of the cave, just like Xe Bang Fai cave. Huey was there talking to the locals in Thai - apparently we had to pay entrance fees to go in, and we had to use their longtail boats to go in. Sue is here going along the side of the rapid into the cave entrance. It was late. We were supposed to turn back at 2.45pm, and it was already 2.15pm when we arrived.

The cave is smaller in height than Xe Bang Fai cave, but the water is equally green and calm just after the rapid.


Here we walk alongside the cave into an area where quite a lot of longtail boats are parked. After walking in, we turned around to see the longtail boaters carrying our kayaks into the cave, one on each of their shoulders! Huey had asked them to bring all of the boats in and have them transported in the longtail boats to the start of the cave so that we can paddle through and come back out again. We had other ideas though - we didn't want to paddle the 20km down Nam Hin Boun's shallow waters in the dark (sunset is at 6pm). So Huey did the only logical thing, which is to do a solo through the cave, while we took the longtail boat in, have a look, and come out by boat again.
So the longtail boats carried us in. We saw many such mineral deposits caused by dripping water from the roof, growing from the wall.

After 15 minutes, The boat stopped and there above a slope before us lies a very impressive array of limestone structures lit up by yellow lights and blue LEDs. It extended very far in, and Xe Bang Fai cave certainly didn't have anything this impressive.

After half an hour inside admiring these structures, we decided that we need to go before it turns dark. The longtail boats took us out, and we hopped onto our kayaks and went off.

It was pretty nice to paddle in the sunset actually, and with most things in kayaking I'm pretty fearless about the night paddling if I actually decide it's safe enough to participate, but then I wasn't sure whether the group psyche is up to it. TC took up the role of leading the group, deciding when we should stop to put on our light sticks and switch on our strobe lights, and then inserted himself in th ecenter of the group to hold it together. We went about the trip patiently, though I could somehow sense mild anxiety held in check through deliberate effort in the air. I just want to enjoy the starry night.

Without daylight, we had to depend on the GPS to roughly tell us where the resort is, just in case we happen to just paddle by without noticeing it. Every 2-3km, David would inform the group of our progress and bolster our spirits, and almost at 7pm sharp, we managed to identify our resort by sight. We had to take turns to disembark and go up the staircase, while JB rounded up the kayaks one by one after I pushed it over to him when one of us leaves it.

And what of Huey? He actually turned up before all of us disembarked! Apparently he paddled really fast, but for a good reason - his boat was constantly flooding after the sharp rocks in the cave made several gashes to the hull. But well, we all manage to have our dinner together, an hour earlier than expected even, and that was what's important. We wouldn't have waited for him to start dinner, that's for sure.