Waterfalls and Bowling Alleys

The next day the girls, Dan and myself hired push bikes to ride around town. A few minutes in Dan & I saw a temple we wanted to check out. Tess’s way of saying she didn’t want to see it was to keep quiet, turn her head away and keep pedalling. Peach followed Tess so Dan and I ended up on our own for the day. Probably a good thing since I think the girls had different ideas about what they wanted to do for the day. We spent the day riding around looking at the great buildings and views across the river.

The next day Dan & I went on a morning tour of a nearby cave that supposedly houses 4000 Buddhas. It was crap. Certainly not worth wasting half a day on at any rate. Although I did buy some local whiskey, called lao-lao, made from sticky rice at a village we stopped at on the way. It’s the sort of stuff that warms your innards whilst relieving you of your stomach lining. I knocked back several shots of it a day whilst I had it.

In the afternoon all four of us went to some waterfalls that were easily the best I’ve seen. The water was a beautiful aqua color and there were several waterfalls that you could check out within a few seconds or minutes walk depending on how far you wanted to go.

When we got back late in the arvo I had a nap and didn’t wake up until 9pm. Peach was asleep so I headed out alone to check out the night market and grab a bite to eat. Whilst strolling around I bumped into an Argentinian who I’d met on the slow boat and he invited me down to the river later to drink whiskey with a couple of other guys from the boat. After a delicious bowl of noodle soup with what looked like Bolognese sauce in it I headed down to the river and found them.

There was myself, the Argentinian (Luis), a Frenchman (Kevin) and a Chilean who’s name I can’t recall sitting at a table near the river enjoying a few whiskey & cokes and shooting the breeze. When we finished the bottle the guys asked me if I wanted to “cruise” with them. I assumed this meant hit the town. We decided to head to the one place in town that was open after 11:30pm – the bowling alley. We got a tuk-tuk there since it was a few k’s from the centre of town. When we walked in there was only a few people there. Within a couple of minutes though 30-50 more people ploughed through the doors. The bars must have just closed.

The bowling alley was a surreal experience to say the least. There was loads of pissed tourists plus a few locals pushing dope and opium – which was being smoked in the toilet. Heaps of people from the slow boat were there too. My whiskey buddies and I bowled a game then we mingled about the crowd – people outnumbered bowling capacity so most just stood around drinking. Dan and Tess had shown up too. Dan and I got stuck into each other about our respective cricket teams and placed bets about the next Ashes tour in England.

About 2:30am I was getting tired and a few people were leaving so I decided to join them. We beat a tuk-tuk driver down to a ridiculous price by threatening to walk all the way back to town and convincing him there was no one else left in the bowling alley and amazingly he caved.