Happy and funny for you!

Let me pick up where Uriah left off. The day after our tubing excursion we decided to get some mountain bikes and check out the many mountains and caves surrounding Vang Vieng. The place is packed with them and the landscape is quite beautiful. We got some Thai made bikes and by the end of the day, we rode back into town with sore asses as the unsealed road are pretty rough. It turns out that those things that look like shock absorbers on the handle bars are fake and just make the bikes look hardcore when really they are junk. My bike would change gears on its own and Uriah's seat had a mind of its own.

Overall, the caves we visited were pretty cool. Along the main road, there were many signs advertising each of the caves with bold promises like "thereisabeautifullagoonforswimmingandfishing" and that sort of stuff. We soon realized that most of the caves have identical signs just to lure tourists and often don't deliver whats promised. Naturally there is some sort of small admission fee to each cave and though cheap they do add up.. No ticketing counters though, usually just some guy half alseep in the middle of a field under some shade handing out little cutout paper tickets.



Tha Pouk ham was the biggest cave that we visited and we spent a good 40 minutes roaming around in the cave trying to reach the end. And we did. One cave we visited had some tight spots to go through that made me wish I was a little smaller. That night we headed out to some of the bars and at one we got slipped the "special menu" with all sorts of illegal no-no's. The picture below is a little blurry but I took it in a rush as I didnt want to look like a narc.



We heard around town that you could kayak between Vang Vieng and Vientiane (the capital city, 3.5 hours away) rather than taking a boring old bus. We somehow thought kayaking all day was a good idea, especially after a day of exhausting mountain biking so we signed up with our Irish amigos Fergus/Anna for the next morning. It pissed rain that night and didnt stop until we were getting ready to leave for the kayaking trip the next morning. Overall, it was a fun trip... Uriah and I had some teamwork breakdowns trying to paddle our 2-man kayak during the first leg but we smoothed things out and finished strong. We did one good-sized rapid pictured below. The guide told us to paddle as hard as we could through it but we opted to hold on for dear life and try not to loose our ores. Along the river we stopped at a point where people do cliff jumping. It didn't look too high from down below but when I got up there (8-10m high) I nearly made poo in my shorts. Still, I jumped and the small headache I had all day turned into a throbbing one 10 seconds later. Lots of fun though! We ended up kayaking 12km (4hours) and we took a sawngtheaw ride for the remaining 100km into town. Another tough day.




So now were in Vientiane, the nations capital and its a pretty decent city but it's stinkin' hot. Like 40 degrees hot. Here's a few shots around town. Vientiane has a lot of European flavour to it and there are lots of nice places to eat. We saw the two main monuments including Patuxai (the one that looks French) and That Luang (the one thats bling bling). Cool. We're just hanging around and we'll be heading south Savannakhet on Monday. That's our last stop in Laos before we crossover into Vietnam. Til then - Derek