[monumentum]

 Photos of Vang Vieng (11-May-2012)

I can't believe that I used to ride that bike (above) around lazy Vang Vieng just months ago, miles away, from where I am now. Looking at these photos now feels like those memories had just been a mirage & nothing more. As it is, sitting hours in front of the computer struggling with procrastination to do work & finally getting down to work has been rather taxing. Besides, the tablet pen has this newly arisen ailment, & wouldn't work properly on Photoshop as long as I kept the left-hand settings on the mouse. So now I've got to stick with the right-hand settings which I really have problem getting used to. As far back as I can remember, I've been doing almost every damn thing using my left hand. & actually I am using the mouse with my left hand, still - just with the settings reversed. Middle finger = left click, Index finger = right click. 

I am perfectly aware that the above is really trivial, but it's really a bother worth mentioning! I mean, the incompatibility of the tablet pen & the mouse.... A thing simple as that is causing so much anguish. LOL. I'm appalled by myself.

 So people usually just paid for their transport dutifully to take them to faraway places like this. Yet, what're the legs for if we didn't make full use of them? We cycled. Of course it's also not really an awesome idea to whiz pass all these stunning sights on a hired pickup - or at least I wouldn't say so. Anyway, these shots were taken on the way to Pou Kham Cave.

 The brilliance, interior of cave, with reclining Buddha & a phallic... (linga?). Be warned that thise brilliance only lasts a few hundred metres into the cave. Beyond that, torchlights & proper footwear. Being cast into pitch darkness & stumbling along slippery rock formations isn't really ideal for one not properly insured. I made it out alive on flipflops without plunging into nothingness, but wouldn't be so lucky everytime!

 Human's vulnerability - I felt that here. The exit looked so close, yet the path is severed by a falloff into a somewhat bottomless pit, where my torchlight wouldn't even remotely suggest its depth. Turning back would mean to scale really steep & slippery surface, on which I'd just slid down on my butt.. (Below) See how wet the surfaces are. The damp in the cave made it really chilly too!

 These (above, below), were taken quite deep into the cave. Thankful that I got out alive, actually. Having gotten that far I figured that Bozo needed a memento shot too. (Memento is this really queer word that I used to always spell as momento, how dumb) LOL at the gigantic lens hood which always appears in my flash shots.

 Having gone through that precarious interior of the cave, this is nothing. I'm so shamelessly talking big now simply because I'm safe. Ya, that's the way up & down with access to the cave's mouth.

 (Above) The Blue Lagoon thing that foreigners like to hang out at. An American guy whom I met in Thailand actually told me that while he swung off the rope into the water, he had his right foot split right open for hitting a rock. Zzz.. & there wasn't a hospital in Vang Vieng well-equipped enough for a wound of that extent, & he had to fly to Bangkok that very day for treatment.

 Nothing much to say about these, perchance, just that the real thing had been WAY better than the photographs here. There are too many things on Earth, mostly offered by nature, that one has really got to see to believe. Yet, I realized that when most people travel, it is tourists hotspots like shopping districts & fancy restaurants that draw them. Nothing wrong with that, each to his own. The only trouble I've got to come to terms with is the capitalist tendencies within every such visit. 

 Vang Vieng sunset. (Below) It is literally 'A View from the Bridge'. This is not my first view from a bridge, but somehow the chord is struck the hardest here with regards to my mental reference to Arthur Miller's play of the same title. More than 7 years ago we were made to study that text for English literature, & the mental note I made of 'A View from the Bridge' had been something really breath-taking, something like this one. Of course this might not be even close to being the best, but...

 There's been this unrelated issue going through my head even since I started reading 'Waiting for Godot' for English literature. If there should be a good text to be studied in the field of literature, is it not better to pick one in its original language, instead of a translated one? I'm not sure if I'm talking sense, but if I read my favorite Yukio Mishima's 'Confessions of a Mask', in English, somehow I think that I wouldn't capture the full essence of such a multi-layered, magnificently written work (in comparison to reading it in original Japanese). Just a thought.

 Dinner at Vang Vieng's Nazim Indian Restaurant. Just saying, this branch has better food & fruit shake than Luang Prabang's branch. Indulging like this wasn't my idea. I think the bill summed up to more than 100,000kips. Wonder how far that would've taken us if we hadn't spend that bit on food.. It was an enjoyable meal, but really, the effect isn't very lasting (or at least that applies for most food). I do not think that it's an insubstantial claim to say that food is trivial. As much consequences as are involved, as long as one does not feed himself downright trash, he'd still get by. Feeding oneself superfluously has been the trend around me, & I'm inadvertently drawn into this trend as well. Thoreau has had a starkly varied view on this issue, & somehow I support his argument. I just don't have the will to change myself. Being mere human agitates me a lot.