Caves and Children

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Cute kids, Sam Neua

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Another long but spectacular bus journey brought us to Sam Neua. Eventually. Not before we'd managed to drive through some telegraph wires and break them.

Sam Neua is near the border with Vietnam, it's a long street of a town, a market and not much else. Apart from lots of incredibly cute kids. The little girls come up to you and clumsily put their hands together in the traditional greetings. And the boys give a little handshake. They are very sweet, happy little things.

We bumped into Tracy a girl we'd met in China and Halong Bay and decided to go together to visit the Pathet Lao caves which were used by the Laos government for the bombing campaign inflicted on the country by the American Military. It was very interesting seeing the living quarters within the caves which were basic. The bomb craters which were huge. There are 400 caves in total in the area, mostly man made and used for sheltering the villagers, soliders and the government staff. Our guide was very knowledgeable too and it was most interesting.

Luckily we weren't on this bus

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The rest of the afternoon we spent relaxing, eating pineapple (we'd bought two enormous ones for 5,000 kip - about 50 cents).

Tomorrow we're off on another 10 hour bus ride to Nong Khiao.

UPDATE: Well yes we were headed for Nong Khiao but after 4 hours we met another bus and the driver said there were seven landslides ahead. We did a u-turn on the very narrow mountain road (eeek!) and travelled for nine hours to Phonsavan. We'd left there about 3 days before. The bus was continuing on, but we decided to get off so we said goodbye to our fellow travellers - Tracy and our Korean friend.  We were very glad we did as we heard later the bus drove to Vientiane without changing driver - he drove for 23 hours straight. Very dangerous on those roads. 

We spent the night in Phonsavan and then went back to Luang Prabang the following day. The idea was to skip Nong Khiao since we'd lost 3 days essentially and go up to Luang Nam Tha for trekking. Price enquiries proved that trekking would cost about $90 each. We can't afford that so the idea is to explore the area around Luang Prabang and go to Thailand from here when our visa runs out in six days. Check out what we did next in the "Back again to Luang Prabang" entry.