Pak Ou caves

 Pak Ou caves 

A bot came and moored in front of our hotel. Seven of us had hired a boat to take us up river to see some caves that host a thousand statues of buddha.

We passed a house boat, a lare barge with a wooden house perched on the stern. It was part of a flood relief project to protect the bank from flooding and collapse whilst also adding a riverside park along th Nam Khan, a tributary of the Mekong.

Where the two rivers meet, the colour of the water is distinctly different and the two colours flow down river together before the current finally mixes the clearer water of the tribitary with the muddy colourd water of the Mekong.

Some of the traffic on the river.

The jungle came right down to the river.

Some entreprising locals had dug into the river bank and there was the entrance to a mine. I could only think that they were looking for alluvial gold.

An indistinct photo but this is just one of several fish farms sitting on the banks of the river. 

Although it wasn't raining on us, there were low clouds and the smell of rain was never far away. 

We rounded a corner and we arrived at our destination. It was a sheer limstone cliff rising out of the water and towered above us. There was a pontoon moored to the base of the cliff that we tied up against. It was a delicate job to walk along a narrow gangplank to get to dry land.

Up steps into the first or lower cave with its buddhas.

More steps, more buddhas...

...and more...

..and you get the picture.

And then there were more steps up to the Upper Cave.

The entrance to the upper cave.

The big buddha at the etrance to the cave...

...and some of the buddhas inside.

After the caves we stopped off at Xing Hai, a small riverside village with a distillery with rice wine and whisky for sale. Some of the bottles also had scorpions, snakes or lizards inside.

The still.

Some of the other stalls, selling a collection of fabrics.

A view of some of the rubbish floating on the river, mostly brought over the border from China.

And a train passed over the bridge just as we went under.