Thakhek Loop Pt. 2 — The road liss traveled

I was definitely glad I stayed in Kong Lor village for two nights, it really has that idyllic Laos countryside scenery. And being right on the river at the resort was great. It’s the same river that goes through the Kong Lor cave, so you can actually hire a boat from the resort to go straight to the cave. Although it’s expensive with no one to split costs with. And I had my bike, so that was no go. Here’s just some of the river scenery and views of the countryside from the road in Kong Lor. Can you tell the bridge is my favorite sunset spot?

the spring water is very cold, creating the mist

The next morning it was off to the famous Kong Lor Cave. I begrudgingly paid almost double the normal price as solo person, road my scooter to the river parking area, got assigned my boat driver, off we went to our little wooden longtail boat. Only one group ahead of us. In dry season apparently you’re able to pay extra to have them precariously strap your bike to the boat and take it all the way through the cave, where you can keep riding on the other side. Although in rainy season they don’t let you do it because the roads on the other side are muddy and bad drivers (most drivers on the loop) can get themselves stuck or injured. Also this year one of the boats doing this capsized and the boatman died because he didn’t know how to swim (and wasn’t wearing a life vest). So it’s ethically dubious, but it’s kind of the wild wild west out here.

The longtail boat parking at the mouth of the cave

We’re off to a bad start on my boat. We approach a bunch of longtail boats parked at the mouth of the cave, and his is the one that is completely flooded with water. WTF. How does that even happen? So I’m sitting there watching him throw buckets and buckets of water out of the boat before we can begin. The floor, where I want to put my backpack is still under an inch of water. Great. So we set off into the all encompassing darkness, my torch and his torch are the only sources of light we have. It’s a pretty trippy experience taking a boat through the cave with just two headlamps. Along the way there’s some small obstacles and rapids to dodge, marked with little colorful buoys.

At one point you can see some lights in the distance, the largest chamber of the cave is illuminated, which is one of two stops where you stop and get out of the boat. Pretty impressive! But the real novelty is the ecosystem that it’s located in, attached to this underground river system. We made our other stop a few minutes up the river, nothing extraordinary as far as caves go, and then it was back on the boat for some relaxing river cave cruising to get to the exit.

Then WOOOMP BOOOOMP CRUNCH! We’ve hit something and we’re lurched off to the side, nearly tipping, before coming to an abrupt halt. It takes us a second to figure out what happened. We’re now sitting there partially out of the water, tilted dangerously at 45 degree angle, resting on a submerged rock. WTF! Although after the initial shock, my first reaction is relief, because we were soooo close to flipping, and if we did, there goes my phone, passport, camera, lenses, laptop. Everything. And who knows if this guy knows how to swim. Yikes

If you want to visualize it, here’s my best attempt. Our boat is stuck on a submerged two pronged rock (red dots) with one prong right below the surface and the other prong a bit deeper. This is not our cave of course, as ours doesn’t have any lights. It’s pitch black except for where we shine our headlamps.

Ok, so the boat is stable, we’re just stuck in the middle of the river in a pitch black cave with no one around. Could be worse! The boatman is very animated now, yelling and presumably swearing and saying all sorts of stuff I can’t understand. This isn’t just your average Tuesday I guess. He’s able to get out and stand on part of the rock that is only a few inches below the surface, and he we wants me to join him there. Ok, chill out buddy. I take all the stuff out of my pockets, take my camera, and stash it into my backpack. There’s not enough room for both of us on this little rocky perch. And this isn’t a smooth river stone, it’s sharp jaggedy limestone. It can easily cut your feet. The bottom of the boat is probably torn up pretty good from it.

I’m trying to stand there with him, but there’s no room and it’s painful. I point that I’m going in the water, which he is emphatically shaking his head no, but there’s literally nowhere for me to go. It’s fine, I can swim. I hop in, and tread water and shine my headlamp on the boat. He relaxes a bit. He is definitely more stressed out than I am, seeing how it’s his lack of attention that got his boat stuck on a rock and his client swimming, and his job is possibly on the line. Not a great look for the guy who drives boats for a living. You’d think these guys would know this river like the back of their hand, they drive it every day. Guess not. Anyway…

He starts shaking the boat as hard as he can. It’s not moving. I try and lift as well, but I’m pretty useless being in the water. He’s yelling and grunting, but it’s really wedged in there good. These wooden boats are heavy! And this limestone is very grippy. We’re getting nowhere. He starts making whistles for help, but c’mon bro, that’s not doing anything. So we end up just having to sit there and wait for someone to come by. I swim a bit and find a shallow sandy spot to stand. But I’m really not worried at all. I’m actually feeling kinda giddy, because if we had capsized, we would have been fucked. Sooo fucked. Well the boat driver more than me. And if both our lights went out? And if this guy doesn’t know how to swim? Holy nightmare material. Forget the passport and thousands in electronics. But now, the boat is intact, nobody is hurt, everything is fine!! This is the biggest tourist attraction in central Laos, who knows when the next boat is coming, but there’s going to be boats coming!

Maybe 10 minutes later we see the lights from a boat coming up the river the opposite way we came – which is odd because we were one of the first morning boats to depart. But yay! It’s a boat with 4 guys in some sort of khaki uniforms, I’m not sure what kind of uniforms, but this is basically the best case scenario. A boat full of strapping young lads! They pulled up next to us and were able to rock and lift our boat enough to get it freed from it’s rocky holding cell. Mission accomplished! We thanked them and the one guy who spoke English said “Don’t worry, no problem” before they sped off into the darkness.

Time to fire up the motor and get moving! Revvv, revvvv, click. Click. Ughghhgh. Nothing. God damn it. More swear words from the captain. He’s whacking the motor like that crazy Russian cosmonaut with the crowbar at the end of Armageddon, “This is how we fix things in Russian Space Station!!” Except it didn’t magically work and he defeatedly took out his big wooden paddle and we drifted over to the nearby sandbar to park. He got out his toolkit and started working on the engine, clanging away, doing who knows what. It’s gonna be a really long day if we have to paddle out! At this point I’m really getting a good feel for what these cave walls look like in this section of Kong Lor.

After 10-15 minutes of Mr. Boatman doing engine stuff, revvvv, revvvvv, bbrrRRRRRR!! We’re back! Out to the other side into the glowing daylight and onto the village to have a little rest, and I could dry off in the sun. The village is mostly stands to sell stuff to tourists, but whatever. My iced coffee tasted great. It’s really pretty on this side, I can see why people want to take their bikes through the cave and keep going in this direction. After 30 minutes break time was over and it was a rather uneventful ride back through the cave to the entrance. I thought about mentioning this mishap to the office, but decided against it, even if he was a shitty boatman, I didn’t really want to try and get him fired. So we parted ways like nothing had happened. No tip though. Definitely no tip for THAT. I did send the office an email a day later about the submerged rock, although I’m guessing the odds of that doing anything are approaching zero.

From here I had the option to take it slow, and spend a night somewhere else on the loop before driving back to Thakhek, or just spend the rest of the day going straight to Thakhek. I felt like I had enough excitement for the trip, so back to Thakhek it was. The last 100km of the trip were all on the highway – the new, not-potholed highway, which is amazing for Laos, but not exactly very exciting to write about. So that was about all for the Thakhek loop. I was back in my hotel bed by late afternoon. So at the end the day, a pretty successful trip! No injuries, no illness, no bike damage, no extra incurred expenses, just one 45 minute river delay. And here’s some photos of my last evening in Thakhek, err just outside of Thakhek.