It's a Long Way Down to the Bottom of the River

If you're wondering at the inspiration for this title, its from a Delta Rae song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bimam2j2gEg).  The experience it relates to is, however, far less depressing and more of a wonderful adventure.  The title is correct, though - it was a LONG way down to the bottom of the river.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Friday morning we left early for our tour of the Tulan Cave system.  There are ten or so caves in the system, and we would be exploring two.  As with many of the worthwhile things in life, it was a bit of a drive away (about an hour), which gave me time to meet my companions.  Rachel was a Texan exploring the world, and she had joined up with Beth (a British girl) in the south of Thailand and two British boys at their last Vietnamese hostel.  The rest of us were solo travelers: myself, Geoff, Graham, Huy, and James.  James had arrived on an overnight train from Hanoi and was rather sleep-deprived, which was hilarious for the rest of us.  He introduced himself as James Bond, secret agent, and the rest of the day was cracking jokes to keep us all in good spirits.

Our first stop was at the main office of the tour company, which seemed incredibly official as it was... Basically a bungalow.  We all sat around while they collected our money and distributed stylish camouflage-print boots (in a very limited range of sizes).  And then we were off!  We drove about half an hour more to a large field where we were let out of the van and suited up with helmets, gloves, and life jackets.  Packs with water canisters and our lunch materials were also distributed.  We looked good.

We hiked up a hill and down into a river bed, wading across as the current tugged at our legs.  Then it was up onto a sandbar, back into the river, and up into a field with high grassy stalks that slid off our life jacket and clanked on our helmets.  Unless you looked straight down at the narrow, winding dirt path, you wouldn't have known there was a set route.

We descended several hundred feet on a series of tilted planks, 

bouldered up the side of a mountain, and at last the cave mouth appeared.

The first cave was half dry mud, which was easy to explore.  We shone our headlights on the squirming pill bugs, confronted blind spiders, trailed our fingers over the textured rocks (before finding out we weren't supposed to - oops), and examined the egg-shaped rocks clustered in the center of the cave, which have been termed "cave poop".  

Apparently these round cave rocks are rare, perhaps even limited to several Vietnamese caves, and they were treated with extreme reverence.  As we sized up stalagmites and stalactites, we watched lone bats swoop low over our heads, or clusters on the roof break into flight like ripples from our pinpoints of light.  Curious, we all turned out our headlamps to enjoy the complete blackness of the cave.  It felt like visual velvet, a warm embrace that sort of settled on your shoulders.  I loved it.  I have always been the girl who shuts off the lights, stuffs pillows in door cracks, and draws several layers of curtains in search of absolute darkness.

But it couldn't last. It was time to switch our headlamps back on an explore the other half of the cave.  On this side, a deep pool extended to a small patch of light - the back entrance.  We swam silently through the cave, lights flickering back and forth as we followed each other's lines of sight.  I bobbed on my back, peering up at the vast ceiling with only my faint beam.  And then we were back on our feet, clambering over rocks onto a beach in a secluded clearing bordered by mountains and the river.

After a quick lunch, we made our way upstream to cave number two.  We swam through its entirety, from end to end, marveling at giant columns, underwater formations, and, at the other end, a broken wall through which streamed light, greenery, and a disorganized cascade of boulders.  Giddy with the spirit of adventure, we enjoyed our last few moments, then turned back and retraced our steps through caves, rivers, fields, over mountains, plank bridges, and underground waterfalls.  We ended atop a plateau, pushing our way through the dried husks and stalks of corn that spread in every direction.

It was a night of retracing steps.  We rewound the day, traveling back to the Farmstay.  Then it was back to Dong Hoi, bumping along in yet another van, though this time to the train station.  I couldn't believe that in less than four hours I had gone from swimming through an underground, underwater cave system to reclining on an overnight train.  Sadly, though, that's when reality hit.  The Farm Stay hasn't been able to secure me a sleeping berth (understandably, they won't book it before you arrive because there are so many no-shows) and I was stuck in another seat.  Let it be known tha Vietnam overnight train seats are more what I had expected the first time around: basically row upon row of bus seats.  The Thai trains had been luxurious in comparison.  But the worst part of the Vietnamese train experience?  The smell.  It was the unwashed smell of trash, perhaps with a hint of vomit.  And, indeed, trash was everywhere.  Vietnam doesn't have a very good trash collection system in the cities and apparently the situation on the trains is worse.  The entire floor and most of the seats were covered in trash, whether bundled into small plastic bags or loose and scattered.  I was the only Westerner in the car, and the other occupants found my presence quite astonishing.  I think that people were still staring more than half an hour later when I finally went to sleep.  But hey, it was a place to sleep and nobody bothered me.  And in the morning, I would wake up in Hanoi.

Spotted: long fingernails.  Usually just one per person, most commonly the pinky nail but occasionally the thumb nail, and usually just on one hand.  Often, the nail is just left long, but it can also be painted. And the other distinguishing feature? I have only seen this on men here.  Since an explanation for this seemingly inconvenient nail eluded me, I looked it up online and many people seem equally mystified.  Various suggestions were posed, from cultures ranging from African American to Vietnamese to Haitian to Chinese.  The verdict?  In some places, a long pinky nail used to be a sign of a coke habit.  In much of SE Asia and Haiti, it was a sign that someone was of a high class and didn't have to do manual labor (note: the people I saw with it weren't high class, but didn't do manual labor.  Perhaps the were moving up in the world?).  The most commonly agreed-upon reason by people who had the nails, though, was for the convenience of picking one's nose and ears.

Bonus fact: Ear spoons actually exist for picking your ears.  They apparently resemble coke spoons; one online forum commenter suggested that coke spoons are a direct descendant of ear spoons.  Perhaps coke pinky nails followed a similar trajectory.