Waterfalls
Thursday, June 26th, 2008An amazing day, but first of all, a little confirmation as to why I am one of God’s favorites.
A few days back Lauren was ill. I left her in the guesthouse while I went to the main strip of Luang Prabang to get myself some lunch and try to hunt down some anti-malarials that wouldn’t make me go all Apocalypse Now. Wandering down the pavement on my way back, I look up to see that no more than five feet from me, a snake is also trying to make his way somewhere. This obviously scared the life out of me, especially as it was so close. It wasn’t a particularly big snake, maybe only as thick as a few HB pencils but about two feet long. It slithered forward, thankfully away from me, and I fumbled in my bag for my camera. Finding it, I began to film in abject terror as the serpent began to cross the road. Now, I’m not saying I wanted the snake dead, but then I felt the divine hand of God as, while I was filming, a tuk-tuk smashed the snake into a coiling, hissing mess. I was literally speechless. As soon as I work out how to put videos onto the blog I will, there is a way, and it is just crazy.
So, back to this entry’s title. Today Lauren and I went with our two geordie friends Adam and Andrew to a waterfall around 28km outside of LP. We got a shitty little minibus there, it took like 50 mins. It was hot and I was sweating and getting a little agitated. (Mike? Agitated? Never! I hear you cry,) we paid our entrance fee, 20,000kip – around one pound ten pence in real money – and we ventured in. We stumbled past a bear enclosure, where plenty of bears lazed in the hot sun. Thankfully, this wasnt the drugged-animal-waiting-for-death debacle that we saw a the tiger temple in Thailand, but a bona fide bear sanctuary, where the bears would be dead were it not for the enclosure. Watching bears on a hot day is folly though, and we sped on through the trail to the waterfall. Amongst the trees we caught glimpses of it, then after a few minutes climb, we were there, as close to paradise as I’ll ever be. Water so turquoise that it looked like gemstones fluffed out by a waterfall. I was quickly in my swim shorts and jumping in from the branches of a tree. It was amazing, the cold water a perfect balance to this baking day. There were plenty of people enjoying the water, though it was not in any sense crowded, thanks mainly due to us visiting during the ‘low’ monsoon season, although today temperatures easily topped 35 degrees.
We then began diving from the top of the waterfall itself, an awesome leap of faith that, thankfully, resulted in an exhilarating experience. Unfortunately, I did land a little dodgy and couldn’t hear out of my left ear for about a minute, it’s still hurting now,. but it was well worth it. Lauren and I sat back at the top of the waterfall, letting the sun bathe us. We were possibly the most smug of all at this point, (I’ll finish there, although in reality I did want to finish with the line ‘we smiled, we had made it,’ but that is too smug even for me)
Tomorrow we head out of LP and down to Vang Vieng for the famous tubing experience. We’re both very excited.
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