The Last Train out of Sydney is almost gone.

I have died and gone to heaven. I am sitting in a bar in a backpacker establishment in Phong Nha getting drunk and listening to this pair of vietnamese entertainers bash out songs for the punters. At the moment they are playing ACADACCA whoopeee. But the best of best things, the last song they sang was Cold Chisels Khe Sanh!! How rich is that! Not more than 200k from the place we have two vietnamese people singing a song about an Aussie digger trying to cope with the imapct on him from the effects of his participation in the American war in Vietnam! My senses are tingling, my mind a buzzing. There are young people around me enjoying thier lives completely oblivious to the significance of all this. They are too young, they were not born when all that happened. I feel a little bit uncorked, spun out with the endless play and counterplay of the wierd strings of life. This is all very real. So to the tunes of the great Bob Marley "No woman No cry" I will try to summarise the journey I took today to the Phong Nha cave. You have seen the pics now cop the story chaps

I was given the advice by the blokes in this B/P hostel that I should come over at breakfast and hang around to see if there were a group of people who wanted to band together to hire the boat to go into the cave. The boats fit 12 people and cost 350,000 dong to do the job so if you gang together it is cheaper. I sat and I sat and I thought that this idea was a fizzer until I met this young lass and her husband from the UK. They had already tagged a couple from switzerland. 5  was enough so we set off for the ticket office and the boats. You've seen the photos from the boat. They were taken as we made a slow and sedate pace up to the cave entrance. Once inside the crew removed the roof and switched off the motor resorting instead to oars. We then paddled into the cave and carried up the river in the cave. You seen the photos so all I need to say was that it was truely inspiring and wonderment making. My fellow passengers and I agreed that we were really very lucky to be here just at that time and weren't we all gobsmacked by it all. The scale was huge, stalactites and stalagmites and columns just kept going and going. Colours changed and flowed like the curtains of formations on all sides. It all looked like time frozen. We went into the cave for about half an hour and then turned around and headed back. Quite a way before the cave mouth we got out of the boat and wondered into the area that had been a hospital during the american war. We were wondering through groves of columns and the unbiquitous stalactites and stalagmites catching glimpses of little grottos and pretty little courtyards of colour and form. I finally staggered into the day emotionally drained and transported into some kind of nirvana. We got back on the boat we 5 and returned down the river to lunch. I was urged to go and see the "paradise cave"  apparently better than Phong Nha but I was too conbubulated to manage another assault on my system. So I stayed in my room and just plain chilled. It was good for my soul. Ah me this travelling is addictive. I could just do this forever.

So I sit here in the Easy Tiger bar drinking my two for one happy hour beers at 20,000 dong (a dollar for gods sake) surrounded by young english backpackers  enjoying thier lives as only they can and good luck to them too they keep me young. See youse tomorrow campers.