THE VERY DARK CAVES

The last thing you want to see when you wake up is two freakishly tall dutchmen with silly hair, but alas that's what I had to deal with this morning.

Or was sitting downstairs, looking pretty sheepish, I wasn't sure if he'd even remember me, but he said he remembered talking to me about TV, and then I was talking to him when he was unconcious. He thanked me, and I said, “don't worry about it, anytime”, and quickly retracted the second part of the statement.

The 7 of us went to see some caves. The Lonely Planet suggested a trio of caves (sadly there was no chocolate or toffee to be had), so off we went completely aware that we would end up paying over the odds for whatever they had in store.

we got a tuk tuk to the river, where we had to cross. The two men in the boat were trying to charge us 10,000 kip each both ways. we refused, so they left. Shit. we were stranded at the side of a river, a good 20 minute drive from town, of course we were gong to pay, knew it and so did they. it and so did they. After we stood there looking like idiots for a few minutes, they came back and we managed to renegotiate a price of about 15,000 kip return. saving ourselves about 25p each. Might not seem like a lot, but the locals pay a fraction of what we do, but I suppose we can afford it.

The first cave was a joke, it was just a big entrance with a budda inside. It was about 10 feet deep and about 10 feet tall. Not much of a cave, more of a large bus shelter.

The second one was great, we'd acquired a guide from somewhere, and he took us across the rice fields to the underwater cave. we jumped into rubber rings and headed in. The bit where you enter the cave is about 4 inches about the water, so it required a bit of swimming, and the currant was quite strong, there was a rope that you could hold on to and pull yourself along. it was supposed to be about 200 metres long, but after about 15 metres the rope ran out and the guide said we had to turn back as the water levels were too high and we wouldn't be able to go any further. a bit of a disappointment. On the way out of the cave, I forgot to grab the rope and got swept away, I managed to get to a small island and hold on before i got washed away. The guide helped me back, which was good of him. As we sat on the dock part, drying off we lamented the fact that we didn't go further, then Tammy rightly pointed out that there were 2 people ahead of us and they hadn't come back, so either they made it further, or they had drowned. Either way we were going back in! We got back to the point where the rope ended, the waters were really fast, and there wasn't much room for the rubber ring, so we managed to use the roof of the cave to pull ourselves along, until we got a still bit of water, up ahead we saw the rings of the two people in front. we past them as they were going out, so at least they hadn't drowned. We ditched our rings and must have walked, crawled, swam for another 100 metres, it was great fun, not very dangerous, but we were still in some pretty tight spaces. And all this without the guide!

It was getting on a bit so we skipped the 3rd cave, as we walked back we saw a monkey in a cage, no reason for it to be there, these were farmers, why would they have a monkey in a cage? Unless it had been caught stealing the rice and it was now in prison.

Still wet and a bit tired we made it back to town, the tuk tuk driver had waited for about 3 hours for us, which goes to show how much we had paid him if he could afford to waste the rest of the day.

We lounged in the room for a bit, and watched HBO (it was that or sit in a bar and watch Friends, and I'd seen Ross and Rachel split up about 200 times already), we hadn't arranged to meet up with the foreign team, but there were only a few bars to choose from so we were bound to bump into them, and we did. Tammy got some bad news from back home and went to bed early, we all stayed out drinking. I didn't feel like a late on as we were going tubing again tomorrow, as Or, Tammy and Jesse had missed out on half of it.

We headed back to the Cue Bar with guitars and instruments in hand. No one could be bothered with playing though, so we just sat around chatting and drinking. I was about to leave when my path was blocked by a large German guy and his swedish girlfriend. “Christian!”. This was the nice German bloke i had met in Siem Reap about 2 weeks ago. Us bumping into each other again was an obvious sign for us to have a drink together we thought. So we did, until about 4am and I forgot where I was staying, and wandered the streets until I found my guest house, in a town this small it doesn't take a lot of wandering.