Today was one of the craziest days of my life.
As I mentioned yesterday, some of us had chosen to try and fit a bit of everything in today, whilst others had opted to spend a full day tubing. I got up at 8am whilst Kelly slept blissfully in bed. It had been pouring with rain since around 5am so we weren’t actually sure if our planned activities were even going to go ahead – luckily everything cleared up in time.
Five of us had opted for a day of kayaking, tubing and trekking. We got picked up at 9am – after breakfast that wasn’t eggs, yay! – and were driven to our kayaks. We started with 4km trip down the river. This was really funny. Being a beginner, I had paired with Paul who said he had had some experience. We did ok for most of it, until we had to stop on the right side of the river. We had a lot of trouble getting over there in time and manage to sail right past the stopping point. People were screaming at us “paddle left, paddle left!” and in the end one of the guides dived into the river to save us and pull us over to the side. Lots of adrenalin at this point!
After getting out of our kayaks we trekked to the ‘water cave’ for around 20 minutes. The newly purchased thongs came off pretty quickly, in favour of just sinking bare foot into the mud.
We had been told we were going to go tubing through the caves – I think we had all envisioned some leisurely float through high roofed caves – not so. We all got into our tubes and had to squeeze through a tiny opening in the rock face. After getting through that, we pulled ourselves along with a rope – in pitch black darkness by the way, we all had our own headlamps (mine kept flickering off). There was barely any room at all, and we kept hitting our heads.
Eventually we stopped and got out of our tubes. What next? Oh, only army crawling through another crack in a rock. This was crazy – such a tight space, not enough room to crawl on all fours. A claustrophobic nightmare – and I still have the sand burns on my knees and elbows. After crawling we walked for a bit, waist deep in water and over very rocky ground before we couldn’t go any further (the water was too high).
And then tubing back out again. It was such an intense trip overall – certainly an experience. After the tubing we ate lunch and trekked back to the ‘Elephant Cave” – this wasn’t too exciting. There was a rock that was sort of shaped like an elephant and the usual amount of Buddhas. Also a tour guide giving the usual broken English history, which I tuned out of pretty quickly.
And then back to the kayaking to find that Paul and I had been demoted! Paul was placed in front of another guy, I was to ride with one of the tour guides. To be honest, this did not bother me in the least! Kayaking for the second half of the trip was so different to the first half! My guide was perfectly capable of manning the kayak on his own – leaving me to occasionally do weak, women’s pathetic paddling which actually does nothing. I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were lots of moments where I thought…”oh look, we’re heading to a tree, we’re getting closer…and closer…I’m sure we’re going to turn soon”…and then eventually we’d turn and be all safe. Brilliant. The rapids were fun and the scenery was beautiful.
We stopped at one of the tubing bars at one point – two strawberry vodka shakes were consumed – yay for tipsy kayaking. A bit longer and then back at the hotel around 4pm.
After this Andy and I decided to go down to the tubing bars again with two people we’d met on the kayaking trip – the place to be of course. We had a really great time here – buckets of whisky, red bull and lemonade were approx $1.50 with stupid amounts of liquor in them. We got really excited when we were joined by the people who had opted to do a cycling tour… almost everyone was there!
This place continued to be crazy – so many drunken young people, plus a couple that had their hands completely down each others pants at one point. In fact, the girl almost took off her pants completely – the Belgians took lots of photos. Certainly an interesting show!
After drinking at the first bar we decided to move on by foot – we had decided that tubing down the river was both expensive and dangerous, so across the rice paddies instead! This is where things began to get interesting. We found Tommy, Katrina and Alison…but no Kelly. Apparently she was at a bar over the river – they had tried really really hard to get her to come, but she didn’t want to leave where she was.
Of course, I wanted to go get Kelly straight away, but the bridges across the river were closed. It was getting dark so all of us had no choice but to take a tuk tuk back to the hotel, without Kelly. I was getting very worried at this point, not knowing where Kelly was was bad.
I got back to the hotel and heard the Kelly had been found – she was in the hospital! I had a very drunken Andy with me at this point so I took him up to our room and made him go to sleep in my bed. Then off to get Kelly! She had a really bad cut in her upper thigh and had had to have stitches. I was just really glad to have found her – she was still very drunk but alive and with me! I had had to pay 600,000 kip to get her out of the place, and our tour guide payed an extra 137,000 kip as well.
Eventually back to the hotel to give Kelly her medicine and put her to bed. I snuck out quickly to get take away fried rice for dinner – I brought it back to the room to eat it next to two very passed out people. As I write this they are both still in their same positions – I am on the third reject bed in the corner.
It has been such a crazy day but I am just very glad that everyone is safe and alive!
(P.S. No photos today, camera stayed at home cause I didn’t want it to get wet)
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