Into the Darkness
The Kong Lor Cave was 25 miles from Nahin in a direction we didn’t want to go, so the bikes weren’t a great option for the day trip. Our alternative transport options were renting motorbikes or tour buses, and we woke up too late for the latter. I had never ridden a moped before so a quick lesson was necessary by the lady renting out the bikes, whose english was not great but sufficient. After a quick drive up and down the street I decided I could handle it so we paid our money, Alison jumped on the back, and we set off for Kong Lor Cave.
The road to Kong Lor is flat, small, and well paved. The traffic is virtually nonexistent; we were passed by maybe a dozen cars and two dozen other motorbikes on the entire 50 mile roundtrip journey. Our blazing 25 mph got us to the caves safely within an hour. The only danger seemed to be to the animals that haven’t figured out what a road is, instead confusing it for a nice place for a stroll or a nap. A group of chickens on our return trip decided our moped was of no consequence and risked life and limb to cross in front of us. One chicken was less fortunate than the rest and was lightly clipped, only suffering a loss of feathers as she quickly made the rest of the journey to the other side. We’ve heard tell of people hitting cows, but they mostly just stand there and stare so avoiding them is trivial on moped or bicycle.
Kong Lor Cave is a massive 7.5 kilometer river tunnel that provided, for a while, the only connection between two villages. Since 2002, it’s only been used as a tourist attraction. A number of boat operators wait around at the entrance for tourists, and it seems there are many more operators than tourists so there is no waiting or booking necessary to get a guide. Alison and I were given our life jackets and hopped into the wooden longboat with our two guides to travel through the cave.
The start was initially a little scary, thinking of all the possible things that could go wrong on a river and then adding the pitch black surroundings, but that quickly passed once we were moving and distracted by the cave. At any rate, the river seemed extremely shallow, in some places no more than a few inches deep. The main selling point of Kong Lor would be its size. Some of the spaces within are so large that our flashlights could barely reach the stone ceilings and walls. It’s an epic space and travelling through it on a small motorized boat with nothing but a couple of torches is brilliant. I thought the best sense of scale was when you passed other boats in the cave, which begin as small pockets of light dwarfed by the surrounding darkness. The guidebook describes it as something out of an episode of Star Trek and the comparison to a television or film set is definitely apt. At one point you leave the boat to see some formations that have been lit up tastefully, but compared to the boat trip itself these are a minor attraction. We both agree that other than the Elephant Village, this was the highlight of Laos.
MD
Photos from this post can be found here
Leave a Reply