Tham Lod cave

I set off this morning with three young French men, a Bulgarian woman and a Canadian couple. At the entrance to the cave we hired a couple of bamboo rafts to take us into the cave. A Thai woman sits with a hurricane lamp at the front of the raft and a man stands on the back with a long bamboo pole, which he uses to push the raft along, like a punt. In the middle of the cave he moors the raft and the woman takes her passengers up steep steps into a series of caves within the cave. The air is hot and thick with the smell of burning parafin from the lamps. Enormous stalactites hang down ominously, threatening to fall on our heads at any moment. Stalacmites form strange honeycomb shapes and numerous phalic. One of the cave is home to numerous ancient coffins, carved from whole tree trunks.  No skeletons though. As we left the central part of this labyrinthine cave system, once more on our bamboo craft, fish crowded around us, leaping out of the water, begging for fish food. We had none. The fish accompanied us the rest of the way. The roof of the last part of the cave was completely covered with black clusters of bats, and the sides of the cave were covered with their excrement.  A woman with a sack was collecting bat excrement, maybe swift excrement too - swifts live in the cave at night.

We left the cave and set off along a forest path, past a tiny monastery, along a red earth path. At a certain point the French men decided to head off into the forest along a narrow trail. We followed, as the path gradually deteriorated and eventually dissappeared altogether. At this point the Canadians turned back and shortly afterwards I and the Bulgarian girl also turned back. We left the boys to play at being lost in the forest and headed back to Cave Lodge.