Thakhek, Laos

There are lots of caves in the area that are explorable in the dry season, but I imagine are raging torrents in the wet. It's now the Very Dry Indeed season.

We took a tuk-tuk today and had a look in Buddha cave, rediscovered by a bat-hungry local a few years ago...supposedly after several centuries of obscurity, yet already containing several thousand Buddha statues that looked to me exactly like the ones you can buy in any Thai market for a fiver each. Quite possibly utter fakery. Nice lighting, though, and delicate formations. Nearby, there was another cave you could swim into, long and dark. Karst chasm is the lowest form of dip, you might say.

Neither cave was as impressive as the huge through cave adjacent to the crag we were climbing at here...greenclimbershome.com

Same same but much better!

Laos - Vang Vieng

Hi blogwatchers if you're still out there - this, at last, is a post from Abroad, yet another trip to SE Asia where the snow never falls! Technical problems consisting mostly of forgetting the required Blogspot username plus password combinations are now overcome! 

There will be verbiage...but to summarise so far, there has been climbing and downhill mountainbiking at Chiang Mai, temple viewing at Luang Prabang and more climbing at Vang Vieng. Green curry has been consumed in considerable quantity, and all is well.