I went with this new little group to get some food, and we met up with Andrea, the Italian man I had seen last night down the river, and Lisa, his British companion. They seemed tense. We ate dinner with them, and a few other backpackers, and hatched a plan to hike up to the cave tomorrow.
After we ate we were joined by an individual who looked so unusual that I had an instinctual hesitation as he approached. His hair looked like a huge woolly shaving brush, rising straight up from a round forehead. He had one wormlike dreadlock dangling off the rear. This was the first afro-dreadlock mullet I had ever seen. His eyebrows were big eruciform carpets, black and thick, surmounting great round dark eyes that seemed ready to emanate a paralyzing mind-control ray. His nose was long and thin, the bridge so narrow it looked like translucent alabaster, and his cheekbones were similarly finely-sculpted and very prominent. His mouth was droopy, his lips purple, and his arms and legs seemed to be composed of knots and burls. He spoke English with a peculiar accent, but I could not place it, nor did I learn his name or his nationality. After he left, someone referred to him as the “Israeli guy,” but an Israeli at the other end of the table quickly spoke up and said “He is not Israeli.”
It rained that night, and we anticipated a muddy hike. The next morning we met at the same place and ate a local delicacy called farang rolls: peanut butter, honey, and raisins rolled into a tube of sticky rice. Our expeditionary team arrived by ones and twos over the course of an hour. In addition to myself, Sophie, Nathali and Moise, there was the bizarre-looking guy from last night, who was called Teizel, from Frankfurt, Germany. Then Andrea, who looked sad and sported a black eye, looking wistfully at the river as we ate our farang-rolls. “Lisa is leaving today,” he said. He showed up a couple from Israel: Lily, slender and muscular with grim gray eyes and a determined manner; and Nir, built the same, with dreadlocks over a handsome square-chinned face and a ready smile, who seemed he would be at home in any environment. Our fast was soon over, and it was time to walk.
We set off along the muddy red road. At many points, buffalo and sandals had churned the entire trail into a slop of varying thicknesses, that imparted a clay sliminess long after you walked through it. Inexpert flip-flop wearers had their footwear sucked off repeatedly.
The sides of the path were bursting with jungle-weeds, fast-growing thornvines and big shaggy bushes with poisonous leaves. Cowbells sounded in the thickets. Sometimes the trail passed under enormous old trees clinging to chiseled-looking boulders. Sometimes villagers paused in these shady spots, studiously avoiding eye-contact with us. To our right the small river flowed in full spate, brimming at the sides, nut-brown and swirly. Children wearing diving masks and carrying spears and primitive crossbows waded around at deep bends.
A wide creek joined the river, and there were stepping-stones across. We all took the opportunity to wash our footwear, as we suffered miseries of clay-clotting. Across the river, there was a short flat area that was fenced off with barbed wire, where shoots of young rice grew. The trail was deeply-churned here, but under the fence was a kind of little ridge you could balance on and avoid the muck. I was walking behind Sophie, who had already slipped once. Despite her care, she slipped again, and her body went straight toward the barbed wire. She stuck an arm out to break her fall, and caught the wire on the upper part of her elbow. She took the force of the fall on the little ridge when her hip hit it, and her arm sprang off the fence. I was in a state of high alertness for the stream of blood and chaos that was about to ensue – but Sophie, kissed by luck, had caught the wire on a space exactly between two of the barbs, and suffered a bad scrape but no punctures or tears.
We reached the entrance to the cave directly after. There was a little kiosk manned by a woman I recognized from the village, and she accepted our entrance fee of ten thousand kips.
The cave was at the foot of a huge steep rock shaped like a camel’s hump, thickly covered with vegetation. A fast stream came out of the gaping mouth of the cave, and we splashed in the cool, clean water for a while. Sophie bathed her wound, and I looked for dragonflies.
The cave entrance was split: the lower hole was filled by the river and impassable except by swimming. The upper hole was at the top of a staircase carved into a jumble of boulders. The stairs were mossy and bore Buddhist inscriptions. This entrance received some sunlight and there were carpets of moss on some of the rocks inside. We climbed down and found ourselves on a shelf overlooking the stream, which curled away to the left. The shelf received much less light, so we slid down the clay slope to the stream and walked up it. It was emanating from a triangular hole at the left rear of the cave. It did not reach the top of the triangle: there was about a foot of clearance.
After some discussion, Moise went in with a headlamp and scouted it out. He returned a few moments later with encouraging words about an open, dry area up ahead. Lily, who had exuded some reluctance even before going into the cave at all, suddenly announced she would wait for us outside. The rest of us stripped down to lights and underwear. There were three lights for six people. We ducked through the hole and found ourselves unable to touch the bottom, swimming upstream toward darkness. Nathali, with no light, struggled toward Moise who waited halfway. He reached under the water with his long arm and gave her a little pinch, and she let out a shriek that was hard and flat in the closed space. Sophie immediately shrieked as well, and they both started thrashing around. Then the noise turned to panicked laughter and a couple of fierce looks at Moise.
After this affray I managed to slip past Moise into the dark tube that ascended from the river. It was smooth and round, as if made by a colossal burrowing worm. After a couple of twists, there was a window in the side of the tube, and total darkness beyond, a chamber so big that my Grade D Chinese Headlamp could illuminate nothing. A few feet away was a little apron of stone that stuck out into the chamber. I shouted encouragement at the people below, and my attention was immediately drawn to the sharply-sloping pit to the right. The light could not get to the bottom, so it was impossible to guess how deep it was or if it was filled with water. There were no loose stones whatsoever in that cave, so a Took toss-assay was out of the question. To the left, however, was a series of cavities in the stone. Reaching out over the darkness, and using the edge of the window-hole as a holdfast, I was able to crawl crabwise over the steep part and onto a wide flat area inside the chamber.
I ran my lamp over the vaulted interior, dislodging bats who whirled away into the darkness. There were a few stalactites, but not of the typical conic shape – these were more bulky, and composed of the kind of wavy, crinkly deposits that look like the edge of an overturned snail’s foot. A path led around the crown of a vast boulder, that could have been some giant monk’s shaved head, and through to another chamber. A gigantic centipede ran away from me, and I screamed in genuine panic. This was no red-and-yellow Scolopendra, no, this was the giant cousin of the common house centipede, with the huge masses of arched legs, as big as a toilet brush and ten times as fast. It wanted nothing whatsoever to do with me, and ran off like Dr Richard Kimball.
I paused, and listened to my comrades. Nir, Teizel, and Andrea had negotiated the breach, but Sophie had convinced herself it was impossible, and there was a loud delay. Moise made it across with no problem, as did Nathali, but they fell well behind the rest of us and did not follow. We had two lights and four spelunkers, and we went on.
The next chamber had startling white streaks on one wall, with a crystalline sparkle, and many more bats that wheeled a couple of times and vanished. This chamber was sloped to the right, also tube-shaped but much larger, large enough that boulders the size of cars were lodged at oblique angles. I imagined it was the trachea of a fossilized Brobdingnagian bosun. We could hear the quiet purr of the river coming from somewhere near the bosun’s larynx. Nir took the lead, lowering himself with ease into a gap and chimneying down past the first big boulder. The rest of us followed and found him deep below us, crossing a smooth round ridge onto a flat space. It was fairly steep but also slimy, and large cave-crickets scuttled unhurriedly away at our approach. Nir helped us across the smooth saddle, and we had a moment of regrouping before we began to descend again. It was not as steep now, and there were piles of guano on the little shelves of the cave-wall.
The path ended at a short drop-off, about five feet or so, into the river. There was a big deep pool fed by a torrent from another chamber further up; the water rushed through a gap and into a bowl-shaped depression before whirling into the pool. The water sent back some of the blue light from our headlamps, giving it a magical sparkle. Nir found a few handholds along the edge and dropped into the water. We followed him, and stood in the deep, cool, fast current for a few moments. I began to crawl upstream, past the waterfall-cauldron, and a little ways up, I saw a bat clinging to the wall. This was the first bat who had not reacted to the light, nor did it as I approached. There was something disquieting about a fearless bat – was it ill? So I slipped back down and joined the other gentlemen, who were heading downstream to see if there was a loop we could make.
The river went into another round tube, and in the glowing-blue water I spotted a white, eyeless fish. I had never actually seen one of these in the wild, and it was an exciting moment. We kept going down the tube until it ended, the air part of it anyway, for the water was going somewhere. We turned off the lights to see if there was any hint of daylight coming up. There was no hint of any light at all, and our ears suddenly sharpened to the sound of the water gurgling down this tube, a great stygian borborygmus that we felt in our ears and noses. We were quickly unnerved and turned the lights on again. The sight of each others’ faces was comforting and we all shared a laugh to break the fear-spell. There were no votes for going upstream. We turned back. On the way up it was more difficult with just two headlamps. Andrea was a perfect gentleman, politely requesting illumination each time I went a little too far ahead of him. There was no trace of shortness or impatience.
We heard the others’ voices after a little while, when we began to approach the white-streaked room. Moise and Nathali had wanted to come down after us, but were anchored by Sophie, who would neither go further nor wait by herself in the dark. It was a puzzlingly easy problem to solve: escort Sophie back and then travel forth, but I suspect some energy from inside the cave was confounding their reasoning. I escorted Sophie out, and we waited a few minutes while Moise and Nathali explored. They did not go as deep, and soon we were all standing in the stream in brilliant sunlight with Lily. The sky was blue and the temperature climbing fast.
It took a few minutes for us to reintegrate with the colors and openness of the surface. Nir, Andrea, Teizel and I traded looks as we described our descent to the others. Their faces were as familiar to me now as if I had spent a weekend camping with them. We were all full of smiles and spirit as we continued up the path.
Another cave opened on the same hill a little ways away, but it was fenced off with barbed wire. Further on the trail became harder and more passable, and there was more evidence of agriculture on both sides. We went through a rocky area shaded by a big tree with buttress-roots, and were swarmed by tiny mosquitoes. There was no trace of wind and they followed us for some distance. Then we came to a big open area the size of a sports field, all terraced into rice-paddies. A little way into this and the hills dropped off into the distance, and we were standing in a broad green valley completely covered with rice terraces. There were numerous trails along the top of the breastworks that formed the divisions.
Winding our way among these, like rats in a labyrinth, we were repeatedly awed by the vast natural beauty around us: great jutting hills with sheer blocky edges, caked with vegetation and casting long shadows across the valley floor. There was a tractor in one of the paddies, and the blatter-blattle of its motor echoed around the walls of rock. Our group divided repeatedly as we chose different trails, but eventually we caught sight of a village at one end of the valley, and all converged there.
We split up to explore Ban Na, which was inhabited by Lao and Khamu people. I found an old woman with tattooed wrists, and got into a conversation with her. Nathali sat nearby, and the woman kept trying to draw her into the talk, although they had no languages in common. At one point I said something that made the old woman burst into laughter, and she turned to Nathali and excitedly related something to her, impervious to the language barrier. Then we were all three laughing, and the village children gathered around us. I passed out cards, and they crowded closer, until the old woman barked at them, scattering them like pullets.
We regrouped at one of the town’s two restaurants, where the proprietress strongly suggested we stay the night at their bungalows. We were happy to relax in the shade. We all ordered the same thing: fried rice with eggs and vegetables. There were hammocks strung on the large open deck of the restaurant, and we made ourselves comfortable. The wall was decorated by a National Geographic World Map in Swedish (the legend said Världen) and a few Beerlao posters.
Teizel talked to Nathali and Sophie, discussing the effects of tourism on villages. His accent was decidedly not German; I had spoken to him in German a couple of times, and while he was clearly fluent, he had the same accent in German as he did in English. He spoke several times of Jordan as a familiar place. Sophie finally asked him what we had all been wondering: what was his heritage? His mother was Romanian and his father Palestinian. There was a sudden electricity in the air, not a bad energy, but a heightened energy, as Nir and Lily looked at him with alert eyes. He said his father came from a Palestinian community in Jordan but had emigrated to Germany to work. He didn’t have anything against Israeli people; he said he felt more German than either of his ancestries. Then he said he met an Israeli guy on a bus who told him the only Palestinians he’d ever seen before had been through a rifle sight.
“That guy was an ass,” Nir said immediately.
“Yeah, I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat back,” Teizel said. “But then the guy, he turned out OK, he told me he was sorry to say it like that, and we had a good talk after that.” The electricity dissipated. Lily mentioned a couple of other asses they had known, and group goodwill was affirmed. Lily was very amusing in a wry and dry kind of way; she had a gift for exposing the root silliness of human attitudes.
The food arrived and we devoured it – a well-earned meal if ever there was one, and the simple fare had a savor accented by exertion and novel experience. The portions were generous and the vegetables, local edible ferns with garlic and onions, were crunchy and fresh. Afterwards we were all drowsy, and lazed around the shady deck while the proprietress patiently reminded us that we could stay the night. I talked with people in the village about Ban Phoon, a Khamu village further up the valley. It was supposedly a three-hour walk and it was possible to overnight there.
When the sun began to sink, we roused ourselves and started the walk back. It was uneventful save for the numbers of farmers we passed, also on their way home. When we reached the cave I let the others go ahead. I went a little ways in and slid down to the creek. There were several large loose stones in the creekbed, and I rolled these around to create a sturdy ring of rock. This completed, I re-emerged and saw the light was fading.
I hurried along the path as best I could, but I was fatigued and slipped often in the mud. A couple of times my feet popped through the front of the sandals, and I almost went sprawling. I was tired when I finally reached the town again, and I saw a woman doing laundry at a small spigot. I asked if I could wash my feet, and she said yes, but when I turned the valve, no water came out. I pointed at it and asked her if there was a water-spirit, and she laughed and yelled to a neighbor downhill. That neighbor closed some distant piece of plumbing, and water pressure returned, rinsing off the clay glop. I washed my face as well, and felt incredibly relaxed and refreshed as I went back to the guesthouse. We swam in the river for a while, then made vague plans for dinner, and retired to our respective hammocks to watch the sunset.
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