The Search for Good Sound

I'll address the topic headline first: my quest for a good set of headphones. I lost another pair (my third of the trip) in Vang Vieng, and have been on a quest ever since to find a new, decent sounding pair. I bought a pair in Vang Vieng for about three dollars, and they turned out to be crackily-sounding pieces of shit, and soon were ejected from the window of a bus. Then after hard searching for good ones I found a pair in Vientiane that looked very good, for about seven dollars. Turned out to be shit. Now I'm keeping my eyes peeled and my walkman on me for a good, legit Sony store so I can get a good sounding pair of noise-canceling headphones, which are precious for bus rides. And you can't put a price on good quality sound.

As for the last few days. Yesterday we dragged our butts out of bed at 4am to catch the 5am bus to the Konglor Cave. The drive through Vientiane that morning was pretty cool, seeing the city at its serenity, when the true beauty is at it's most. And I discovered that Vientiane is more modernized than I thought. They have traffic light cameras! After a six hour bus ride and a two hour tuk tuk ride, we made it to the caves and managed to get the last boat ride through. It was incredible. The Konglor Cave is supposedly the biggest cave in the world, and it feels like it. You rip through a good section of it on a motorboat, where they beach it and you walk up a hill with the guide to where the cool stuff begins. Just when you think it's going to be all in the dark, the guide flips a switch and the whole cave is illuminated with flourescent, blue and orange light. The lighting job is absolutely amazing; the blue makes it look like a scene from a science fiction movie, and the orange light that sillouetes the rock formations give you the feel that you're descending into hell. So far this has been the coolest natural thing I've seen other than Mount Everest. It's a little bit of a journey to get there, but well worth the trip.

Today was another long journey by tuk tuk. First was a two hour ride (with twenty four people jammed in a tuk tuk smaller than a minivan) from the caves to a junction town where we caught another four hour tuk tuk to Tha Kaeck were we caught a three hour bus ride to Savannaket, from where I'm typing this email. And in the morning we catch ANOTHER bus to Don Det, a small island in a river delta group known as the Four Thousand Islands.