Traveling Off the Beaten Path

Last year I took a semester off to backpack through Southeast Asia for about four months with my boyfriend. Seem like a long time? Well it was! About halfway through I started missing home big time! Although I was having the time of my life with barely any cares in the world, being away from home took a toll.

Generally, the homesickness would occur during certain situations like: during bad travel conditions, getting lost in the dark, and being excessively tired or hungry. This is understandable as who doesn't get a bit cranky when the previous problems occur. The good part is that these things didn't last forever and I was able to enjoy my trip time and again. The funny part is that although these issues would come up once in a while, all these issues also occurred simultaneously during one specific excursion off the beaten path.

Provided by: Sarah Aves

The excursion has just recently started becoming a popular tourist attraction in southern Lao; which Laotians have called "The Loop". This excursion includes a four day motorbike trip through rural southern Lao with the main highlight of the trip being the Konglor Cave. This cave was amazing! It was so large that you could boat on the river running through it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first day we got our bikes my boyfriend and I headed out early in the morning. Keeping in mind that my boyfriend and I have little motor biking experience (i.e. we can ride a bicycle). About an hour in, my boyfriend falls off his bike and scrapes up his chin, foot, hands and bent the foot rest on his motorbike. Fortunately he was not going very fast so that was the limit of his injuries. It also just happened to be our luck that a small repair shop was across the street where he fell and they were nice enough to bang the foot rest back into place at no charge.

Sounds nice enough, right? Don't worry it gets much worse. This incident puts us a bit behind schedule. Plus my boyfriend has now decided it's a good idea to drive more cautiously so we are moving slower even though we have a certain town to get to before sun down. We keep pushing on and then I tell my boyfriend that he should not tie his sweater on the back of his motorbike as it might loosen and get caught in his wheel. Of course he ignores me and shortly after I end up turning around because my boyfriend has gone missing. Once I find him further down the hill sure enough he's standing by his motorbike with a sweater tied up in his chain. I hate when I'm right.

Luckily some Lao girls stopped to help him and they end up getting a friend of theirs to come with tools to try and fix his bike. As this happens it starts pouring on all of us and all we have are little rain ponchos which we are trying to share among the six of us. The guy ends up taking off another bent piece from my boyfriend's motorbike but luckily it still runs fine. We thank them and try and offer them some money but they are just happy to help. Southeast Asia has some of the nicest and most genuine people I have ever met.

Provided by: Sarah Aves

We're back on the road again but the sun is setting fast, as it rises at 6am and sets at 6pm every day. Very strange to experience when you are used to the Canadian seasons. Anyway the sun sets and we are stuck driving around in the dark as there are no street lights anywhere, this is what we would call the boonies in Calgary. Meanwhile it has just poured heavily and the roads are like mud pits. We keep going trying to drive through these pits looking for the bridge we are suppose to find but don't find it. We try asking passing locals which way to the town we are trying to find but people keep giving us different directions. We end up biking back and forth down the same road for a couple hours.

By now we are exhausted and starving. We just want somewhere warm to sleep. We wander into the only little village we can find on the way and ask some locals where a guest house is, but they don't speak any English. My boyfriend had bought a Lao book so you can speak Lao but it is a very hard language to learn as it has many tones which change the meaning of the word. So the book ends up being useless and we basically start playing charades with them, holding our hands up to our face in a sleeping motion.

Finally the neighbours collaborate and understand what we are asking. They take us to another house where a kind family allows us to sleep on their floor. He gave us each a pillow and a blanket which was all we wanted at that moment. He ended up sitting with us for a bit while we had our dinner of old crackers and shared a juice box as that was all the food we had left. We thanked him the best we could and slept for a few hours.

The next morning we left even earlier and headed down the road. Sure enough we come across the bridge and town we were looking for in about an hour and a half. We end up having breakfast there and then head to the next town. All goes well for day two and three on the motorbikes other than having to drive through a jungle. Seriously I mean jungle, because the dirt and giant rock path which we had to drive down was only wide enough for our bikes and visibility was very small as it was windy and surrounded by jungle. Oncoming traffic almost hit us a few times, because you would have to drive fairly quick to just get over the large rocks. One upside is that I feel like a motorbike pro now. After that trip everything else was a cinch to drive on.

Provided by: Sarah Aves

By the fourth day we finally get to see what we've been waiting for, the Konglor Cave. When you see the cave it is hidden among beautiful trees and they arm you with a life jacket and a head light. The guides are armed only with one head light. We enter the cave on one of their small canoe like motorboats. They take us slowly by some of the highlighted caverns and we get to walk along a long path. It's amazingly large and we head back towards the boat thinking that's the end. But we get back in the boat and start heading farther into the darkness. The guides start speeding up and the man in the front of the boat flashes his tiny headlight back and forth in front of the boat. I don't know how they can see anything but we keep winding deeper and deeper into the cave going quite fast.

At one point something hits the bottom of the boat and the boat starts moving sideways. At that moment my mind starts racing with thoughts of the creatures from the movie "The Cave". Very scary movie if you like those I would suggest you rent it. So as I'm silently freaking out because I don't want to be uncool the front guide jumps out of the boat. Finally I realize that we've just hit a shallow spot, just rocks are scrapping the bottom of the boat.. Not creatures. He pushes us forward and we carry on. At last we make it out of the cave on the other side, have a short break and then head back through once more to get back to the start.

After that we head back to the original starting point and hand back our motorcycles. Our lender just happens to be busy with a friend and waves at us as we park the bikes. He grabs us our passports and thanks us, saying goodbye. By now we are so happy to be off the motorbikes and back to walking. One of the most awful but amazing and adventurous excursions I have ever done. Now that I look back at it, it is one of my best memories from Southeast Asia.