Spelunking Phoukham Cave

This weekend Nick and I went to Vang Vieng (a backpacker town three hours north of Vientiane). We've been there once before, but this time we came with one goal in mind: to explore the cave at the Blue Lagoon. We had visited the cave before, on our last trip to Vang Vieng, but it was the same day we explored another cave so we were kind of tired of spelunking. This time, we came prepared to spend a good chunk of time in the dark. 

To get to the Blue Lagoon from downtown Vang Vieng, you have to cross the river at the toll bridge (on foot, bike, or, what we did, truck, which costs 20,000kip or $2.50) and drive about 7km on some dirt roads. 

Blue Lagoon is a pretty big tourist attraction, and it costs 10,000kip ($1.25) a person to enter the park, but it's well worth it. A lot of the visitors are tourists, but a lot of them are Lao, too. 

The Blue Lagoon has:

- A swimming hole with rope swings

- The Poukham Cave (it's enormous)

-  A recreation/ grassy area

-  Some raised gazebos to relax in

-  Food for sale

-  An incredibly sketching looking "Fishing Club" next to the parking lot

Quick suggestions: Consider bringing your swimsuit, the swimming hole is kind of cool. Bring water (everywhere in Laos, bring water). Rent the headlamps at the bottom of the cave staircase- they're only 10,000kip ($1.25) and it's totally worth it. 

Swimming hole (there's a tree to jump off of, and a couple rope swings!)

Park area sells overpriced Lao food and drinks.

Drugs are illegal in Laos, but the party scene is alive and thriving in VV.

The climb to Poukham Cave is really steep, and everyone moves at their own pace. We got to the Blue Lagoon around 10am, and there was practically nobody, but when we left around 11am the stairs leading up to the cave were crowded. There are few handrails and many, many places where you could lose your footing. Great quad workout, though.

(PS this was my first time using the Camelbak backpack that Nick gave me for Christmas- that thing was SWEET.)

At the entrance to Poukham, you are staring into this giant cavernous chamber. The light from the sun makes it easy to see the first chamber, which includes a Sleeping Buddha shrine. (For some reason Lao people put Buddha shrines in pretty much every cave where tourists may visit. Don't know why.) It's pretty easy to explore this part of the cave, even with crappy shoes, since it's so well lit and there are usually people around.

Nick standing in front of graffiti pointing to "Cave". Which I totally didn't get, because we were already in the cave. If you go that direction, there's a small chamber that's pretty cool, but it's by no means the biggest part of the cave, nor the coolest.

When we got further back in the cave (so much so that we were completely reliant on the headlamps we rented), we found this area with scribbles all over the cave walls. For a minute I thought they were graffiti, but then I realized it was people writing and drawing with mud from the cave floor. So I decided I wanted to leave my mark, too. (It was trickier than I expected- pretty much anywhere that I could reach was already covered with markings, so I had to do some weird rock-climbing moves to shimmy along the cave wall to get a new area to write on. That's not cave floor I'm standing on, in the picture above.)

Originally I was going to write "K + N were here" but (a) my balance isn't that good, and (b) writing in mud is harder than I thought. So I wrote "K + N" and realized afterwards that it's above someone else's writing of "are watching you".
It's way more epic that way.

I don't have any pictures that can show the enormity or the awesomeness of the biggest cavern. It was HUGE. And pitch black. Easily the biggest cave I've ever been in.

Nick wanted to explore more but the last time we were in a Lao cave in VV the tour guide, in his broken English, explained at one point, "this way, we can crawl" (gesturing crawling) "but have to turn back if RAWR" (gesturing an animal that I would think was a bear). So I didn't want to meet the "RAWR" and convinced Nick to head back before we got too lost (I know, I'm a wimp). Most of the exploration, we could hear other people in the cave, but we couldn't see them.

Rocking the head lamp.

View of the Sleeping Buddha from the other side of the cave. 

King of the mountain.

Kind of Gollum-like.

Also I should mention: to prepare for this trip, I wore good hiking / workout clothes, hiking shoes, my Camelbak full of water, brought a polar fleece sweatshirt, and rented headlamps, all because we wanted to be "cave-ready".
But when were were exploring the cave, there were DOZENS of Asian (typically Chinese or Japanses) tourists who were wearing flip flops, ballet flats, skirts, dresses, make-up, whatever, and using the flashlight from their phones for guidance. Granted they didn't look nearly as comfortable or cave-ready as Nick and I were, and some of the Asian girls were miserable, but I don't think the cave is as hard to explore as we made it out to be.

If you're in Vang Vieng, there are a ton of things to do: tubing, dune-buggying, swimming, partying, etc. But the coolest thing I've done there, so far anyway, is exploring this cave. It's freaking cool.