Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my !

On our last day in Luang Prabang we hired a taxi van driver to take us to the Kuang Si waterfalls, which were about 30kms from town. Now I know that 30 kilometres doesn't sound far, but when you're spending the time bouncing around the back of a small van on unsealed roads with a roof 6 inches lower than your natural head height, it just seems so much more adventurous. The drive there through the countryside was fantastic. Small kids jumping off bridges into rivers, men steering water buffalo attached to ploughs through flooded rice paddies, huge mountains covered in dense jungle, swarms of enormous dragonflies hovering above ponds. It was everything you would imagine and more. When we arrived there our driver, an enormously friendly Benny Hill lookalike, told us he would be waiting in the shade under the trees and we should take as long as we like. We bought our tickets (everything costs) and headed up the hill. Halfway up, we came to a large enclosure with a bunch of funky looking bears in it. They were all reasonably small and looked like they had big afro hairdos. Asiatic brown bears, apparently. Now we've seen many caged animals in our travels and pretty much all of them look very poorly looked after, and are usually kept in small, cramped cages. Not so the bears with the big hair. They were rescued as cubs from poachers who had killed their mother, so they could steal the cubs to sell on the black market. They all looked pretty healthy and their enclosure was a good size. They had all sorts of climbing frames and they even had a river running through the enclosure, which would make it expensive real estate where I come from. After watching the bears for a while we moved a little further up the hill, where we discovered there was a real life tiger. He lived in an enclosure roughly the size of Pembrokeshire, so off we wandered around the perimeter to see if we could find him. At first we were seeing tigers everywhere in the undergrowth, before realising that they were actually just bunches of twigs. They do blend in very well, you know. Finally, after making it around to the far side of the enclosure, we found the tiger asleep in his little concrete house. They could have told us, we spent ages looking for that git. This little chap was a 5 year old, also orphaned by poachers and brought to the park when he was about 8 months old. I say little chap, but he was probably about six and a half feet long from tip to tail and would have weighed in at a few stone more than me. Fat sod. Anyway, he wasn't impressed with us and didn't even bother to get up. He just farted and cast us a lazy stare. A bit like Cara on a Sunday morning. As we left the tiger I had a nagging thought at the back of my head that I couldn't quite put my finger on.

The waterfalls themselves are great. The bottom of the falls has been turned into a bit of a picnic area with benches and the like, but up each side of the falls are pathways that the great majority of visitors don't even bother with. We set off up one side and after much scrabbling in the mud and crawling under fallen trees, we came to a walkway out to the edge of the falls about halfway up. There were several cascades running over the path away from the main falls, so Cara and I whipped off our clobber (we had swimmers on) and clambered up the rocks. We were the only people there and we had a cracking time mucking about in the falls. The water was quite cold and it was good to cool down. After that we set off up to the top of the falls, but didn't really achieve much more other than ruining my sandals getting eaten alive by mozzies.

Once we had made our way back down to the bottom, I wanted to trek up the other side as well but Cara wasn't up for it, so she stayed there while I set off up the opposite side. Halfway up there was a wooden walkway than ran right up the side of the falls, and actually in them for some way. It was here I saw an enormous, dead, hairy spider lying on the side of the steps. Now you might think I'm jumping to conclusions, but I've always assumed that where there are huge dead spiders, there are more likely than not, huge live spiders. It was from this point on that I paid a bit more attention to where I was putting my feet. Once I had almost reached the top I came upon a clearing in the jungle canopy and stopped to admire the view. I could see for miles across jungle and rivers and mountains. I don't know if it's the altitude, but the sky here is such a fantastic shade of blue, really deep. I stood there, watched it for a while and thought to myself 'you pillock, you should have brought the camera !'. At the top of the falls, some king soul had put a timber handrail up across the top, right at the edge. Obviously, I had to trek out there and check it out. I edged my way across the top of the falls, checking my footing before each step. As I made it to the middle of the falls the flow of the water got a bit too strong and I was unsure of my footing. It was at this exact moment that I realised I was stood at the edge of a 300 foot waterfall, with nothing between me and a free flying lesson except for a bit of soggy timber. As I turned to head back to the side, something large and shiny moved by my foot and I almost fell into the water with shock. It was a bloody crab ! A great big bloody crab scurrying across a half submerged rock at the top of a waterfall. You don't get that in East Twickenham ! As I slipped and slid my way back to the side I thought to myself 'Thank God you didn't bring your camera'. Shortly after I'd made my way back to the side, a couple of kids came along and skipped across the top of the falls in about 14 seconds flat, without even getting their ankles wet. They're such cocky little sods at that age, aren't they ? Anyway, after I'd pushed one of them over and threw rocks at the rest of the them, they were a bit more cautious about where they stepped !

Back at the side of the falls, I just stood there for a few minutes taking in the views across the valley and the jungle that covered everything. It was now that I suddenly realised what the nagging doubt from earlier was. The tiger down the hill was found nearby. In Laos. Tigers. Nearby. Real tigers with real paws and really big teeth. Alive. In the wild. Around here.




Shit !




On the plus side, I was no longer worried about the spiders. Despite this I managed to get back down, and if I say so myself, I did a fantastic job of not getting eaten by a tiger. Actually, none of that is true. Just trying to make it sound more interesting than it was. I've got more chance of being randomly assassinated by a disgruntled postal worker than ever bumping into a wild tiger in Laos. There's probably only 3 of them left, and one of those lives in a cave and only comes out for Christmas. How the hell else do you make a trip to a bloody waterfall sound interesting ?

After that, we went home.

The End