Getting to Cave Lodge

Cave Lodge is a remote guest house comprised of various bungalows and an open deck that serves as restaurant and common area. The name of the local cave is Tham Lod (Lod Cave), and the nearby town is Ban Tham Lod (where ban means house or houses). We stayed at Cave Lodge for a full week, and although there weren't as many fellow cavers as we'd hoped, we were able to meet some interesting people and convince some of them to join us in (a few of) our adventures.
November 9, 2009

Cave Lodge is a remote guest house comprised of various bungalows and an open deck that serves as restaurant and common area. The name of the local cave is Tham Lod (Lod Cave), and the nearby town is Ban Tham Lod (where ban means house or houses). We stayed at Cave Lodge for a full week, and although there weren't as many fellow cavers as we'd hoped, we were able to meet some interesting people and convince some of them to join us in (a few of) our adventures.

This is a companion piece to Ryan's description of the caving we did in the area. I'll mostly describe the location itself, but also some of our non-cave activities, the people we met and the overall experience. Although the food was really excellent here, I won't go much into details of each dish, nor a blow-by-blow account of what we ate. It suffices to say the cooks at Cave Lodge are really excellent and the only dish I didn't like to the maximum was my sweet & sour order, but I don't really like sweet & sour anyhow and only got it to see if I would like it more when prepared by such an excellent cook. I did like it more than usual, but it just wasn't my favorite dish there. It's not fair to leave the food with a bad review at the end, so here are some of the tasty dishes we encountered at Cave Lodge.

Breakfast dishes, all excellent:

• Pancake - one big, fluffy pancake with crisp edges, smothered in yogurt, honey and fresh banana, watermelon and pineapple.
  
• Muesli - although muesli isn't quite as sweet as American granola, it's sweet enough when smothered with honey, yogurt and the same fresh fruit as the pancake treatment.
  
• Oat porridge (oatmeal) - hearty, filling, and great on an upset stomach, like the one I had after the atrocious bus ride to get here. I'll get to that in a moment. The porridge came smothered with honey and banana.
  
• Boiled rice soup - A Thai-style breakfast of a soupy broth with rice and chopped vegetables. Maybe it's weird to westerners, but no more weird than eating horse food (oatmeal), stir-fried meat (scrapple or sausage and eggs) or any other breakfast food that's only acceptable because it's become normalized through repetitive exposure. Anyhow, it was tasty and good for extra hydration with all the liquid in it.
  
• Fruit plates and fruit smoothies - local, garden-fresh fruits of delectable deliciousness. The bananas here deserve a special mention because they are short, thick beasts with large black seeds. They are a little chewier than the long western banana, but sweeter as well. In comparison to the short bananas found in Hawai`i (apple bananas), those are a little tangier than the Thai variety. These are the same bananas that get grilled in or out of the skin and doused with sweet, thickened coconut milk and sold for a handful of baht by the street vendors in Chiang Mai.

Dinner dishes (curries, stir-fries and so on):

• Green curry with pork
  
• Chicken cashew - these cashews were perfectly crisp and sweet.
  
• Red curry with fish
  
• Pumpkin curry - not on the menu, but after encountering a big pumpkin patch one day we figured it should be available, and found out all you have to do is request it.
  
• Holy basil, fried basil, pepper and basil, etc. - A smorgasbord of basil stir-fries with any kind of meat. Definitely aloi: quite hot and very delicious.
  
• "Shan special" - one of the local tribes in northern Thailand and spanning the nearby Burmese (Myanmar) border are the Shan people. The staff at Cave Lodge are mostly Shan, and this is listed as "what the staff eat." It's vegetarian, very spicy and served with rice. You get two dishes of some local vegetables and fermented soybean (like a very soft tofu).
  There are more dishes, but I can't remember everything we ordered. Ryan might have kept a better account, but they were all good and we didn't really get pictures of them because we usually left our camera in the room when we came up to eat.

Beverages:

• Hot or cold lime & honey - it's tasty either way. Hot in the morning, iced in the evening. It's a mixture of lime juice and honey, like a limeade.
  
• Café Boran - I have no idea what the name means, but it's like a hot Thai Iced Coffee. I mean, it's a mug of Thai filtered coffee (called Ancient Coffee in Chiang Mai, we think because it's not the modern "instant" variety = Nescafe and others), then sweetened with sweetened condensed milk. The sludge at the bottom means it's good, right?
  
• Smoothies - Passion fruit, papaya, watermelon, coconut, banana, lime. Mix any of these and add milk, yogurt, honey or not. The prices seemed high (70฿ or 80฿?), but the quality was good.
  
• Golden Triangle - our only alcoholic beverage while staying here. Partly due to the Thai custom of drinking sparingly (enforced by the steep prices for alcoholic drinks), we haven't had that many hard drinks in Thailand. Consequently, a little is going a long way, and we only ordered these on one festive night. Nonetheless, they were very good. The Golden Triangle refers to a historic opium-growing area in the north. As a drink, it consists of Thai whiskey*, lime, passion fruit and sprite.
  *Thai whiskey is really a rum made from rice. I'm not sure how that works. There are several national brands, but many people in the north make their own.

Okay, that does it for the food. I feel I need to cover the bus rides and other transportation that brought us from Chiang Mai to Ban Tham Lod, especially since the first minibus ride was unpleasant enough that it drove me to eating oat porridge the next morning for breakfast. I hate ordering oatmeal at a restaurant, because it seems silly to me to pay restaurant prices for something so simple and cheaply made at home. But in this case, I have no home, and the quality was very good, so I have no regret. But the minibus ride, that is another matter.

Cave Lodge lounge and restaurant

We have no pictures of any of the food at cave lodge, and hardly any of the people because we were out most of the time and kept leaving the camera in our bungalow when we came up to eat. This is the dining area.

Minibus #1, Chiang Mai to Pai (Monday, 9 November 2009)

The morning in Chiang Mai started out inauspiciously. We were still in the mode of taking our anti-malarial medicine first thing in the morning with lots and lots of water, which always left us feeling quite unpleasant as that much water in the morning is anathema to good health, I have come to believe. (I'll post all about our Doxycycline experience later on, but before we figured things out we were drinking anywhere from .5L to 1L of water every morning with our pill, then waiting an hour before introducing any food. Each time we felt unwell, we upped the amount of water, working on our interpretation of advice to consume plenty of liquids with the pill. I'll give away the punchline now and say that over time we worked out a winning strategy of eating breakfast first and taking the pill a couple hours after that, and drinking sweetened tea instead of water. This method had the least amount of stomach rebellion, but alas, such cleverness was not yet in our thinking, and this morning we were still mired in the losing strategy of drinking too much water on an empty stomach, and adding injury to insult with the medicine.)

After packing my things up, I ran down to the post office to mail a package while Ryan finished getting ready to go. I got delayed at the post office, so Ryan went out to grab some Shaking Milk for us from our favorite shop and we met up on his way back. He'd gotten a flavor we saw someone else make —Milo (a malted chocolate flavor popular here) layered up with milk, sweetened condensed milk and maybe some chocolate syrup or something. Unfortunately, we weren't sure whether that one was blended with ice or just poured over the ice, so Ryan got one of each (one for each of us). The blended method turned out not only to be the method we'd seen and wanted, but also the superior construction as well. Feeling noble, Ryan drank the ice cube variety himself and preserved the blended one for me, but by the time we met up, the hot sun had melted the ice in my ice-blended shaking, so it was about as liquid as Ryan's non-blended drink. I'd say that was inauspicious sign #1, generously overlooking our bad pill practice of the morning and the delay at the post office. As it was, we were now rushed to get back to the hotel to meet our ride to the minibus station.

We raced back (I raced and Ryan caught up shortly) and began taking our things downstairs, just as the minibus ride arrived and it was time to go. We wolfed down our breakfast of bean-filled chive or sesame donuts (quite aloi, despite my blunt description) and hopped aboard.

Our ride dropped us off at the minibus stand where we were soon joined with other passengers, including a rowdy bunch of Australians who immediately dominated the place with their vociferousness. When the minibus arrived, the Australians dashed aboard and grabbed up all the best seats, forcing me to the very back of the bus and leaving Ryan with only the passenger seat up front available. Even then, the bus was oversold and a late arriving passenger had to squeeze up front between Ryan and the driver. Despite having to split from Ryan* and sit in the very back, I thought the bad morning would soon be better, because I could at least rest my head sideways on the pile of luggage and get some sleep, which I did, for the first hour of the trip.
*There was a guy saving the seat next to him for "my girlfriend" who hadn't arrived yet, and I wanted to tell him that 1) she's not even here yet, and 2) his girlfriend shouldn't take precedence over my husband, and I might have done so, but there was only the single seat left open so Ryan and I would still have to split up and nothing would be gained. So I kept quiet and sat in the back.

Just over an hour into the trip, I woke up about 3 second before the loudest of the Australians – a big guy with a hairy chest and his shirt unbuttoned to the navel like some kind of cheap Elvis impersonate (he even had the quasi-mutton sideburns)– just before he threw up into a plastic bag. He handed the bag to the girl sitting next to him (another of the Australians, so at least she's not a total stranger in the story) and proceeded to do whatever else while the girl held this plastic sack by the handles, not really knowing what to do next. Naturally, it was a cheap sack with tiny leaks, and soon enough she began hollering for the bus to stop, for somebody to help her, that this bag was leaking sick all over her, and so on. As she hollered, no body really paid her any attention that I could see, but the bus did finally pull over about 5 minutes later because we had arrived at our first snack stop (I think). Anyhow, everyone fell out of the minibus, and the girl got some napkins (the cheap, flimsy kind that satisfy nothing but are the best you can find here in Thailand) and soon enough we were back on the bus.

With a nearly two hours to go, I hoped I could go back to sleep, but all the excitement was still keeping me awake, and worse, we hit the mountains very soon after that and the back of the bus began throwing me up and around as rounded every tight bend. A German woman raised an alarm a little later, and the girl who'd held the plastic sack of puke immediately hollered for the bus to stop and pull over, but the woman assured her that she only needed to use the bathroom, not sick, and we stopped again pretty soon for her. Meanwhile, Elvis kept popping Dramamine or something and chewing gum, and the entire experience, plus my morning liter of water and the anti-malarial pill I'd taken, and the curves we kept taking at top speed, and the constant conversation about people being ill kept me awake and on nervous edge. I coped by plugging one earphone into a single ear and listening to quiet music. I had to pay enough attention to the road that I wouldn't be taken by surprise on the turns, but distract myself just enough that the Australians' throw-up conversations didn't get to me. Boy was I glad when we got to Pai, though I think that's the last time for me to have such a feeling.

Pai

Once you have been to Pai, I think it is not possible to be glad to arrive there. The city is a gigantic outdoor mall dedicated to ensnaring naïve backpacking tourists. The streets are narrow and either one way or not, but in either case the traffic crawls along as motorbikes, street carts, pedestrians, busses and all manner of vehicle vies for immediate supremacy. We looked in the Lonely Planet for a restaurant recommendation because it was time for lunch and selected something that sounded like it might be good, but in the end the food was passable at best (actually, I'm being poetically harsh to Pai, which satisfies many people with its opportunities for adventure in the surrounding area and probably has at least some decent food. Our lunch wasn't really any worse than Thai food in Los Angeles, which used to be just fine for us). While we were at lunch, I heard a clatter and a crash and turned to see a minor motorbike accident involving a novice tourist (the driver) and two traffic signs that she'd knocked over on either side of the street before falling down herself. Ryan got some ice cream from the 7-11 while we waited for our next minibus to take us to Sappong. My stomach wasn't feeling up to any unnecessary food after that morning.

Sappong

The minibus to Sappong was heaven compared to the purgatory of the first ride. It was modern, the seats were comfortable. The other passengers were quiet and kept to themselves - mostly Thai people commuting from somewhere else to Sappong and only stopping in Pai because it was in the middle. Ryan and I sat together and had a lovely trip, and then we were in Sappong, just 7 km from Cave Lodge.

Lonely Planet describes a couple ways to get to Cave Lodge from Sappong. Most are very expensive (several hundred baht), but motorbike taxis were listed as the cheap option at about 70 baht per person. Having no idea what that meant (Ryan was rooting for something like a motorized pedicab, I began to suspect something closer to the truth), we soon found ourselves sitting on the back of two motorbikes, carrying our luggage while trying to hold tight to the very small men driving the bikes. Fortunately we were riding in the afternoon - guests arriving to Cave Lodge later in the evening who'd come by the same means said it was like a bug buffet as the setting sun brought cool air and the plague of insects that come out at such hours.

And now we're finally at Cave Lodge, in Ban Tham Lod, and after picking out our room (small, with some floor space in front of the frameless mattress and a private bathroom; 540 ฿ per night), we went up to get supper and meet some fellow guests.

Cave Lodge bungalows
Hungry dog at Cave Lodge (but so loving!)	Our room at Cave Lodge

Due to the length of this post, I'm going to break it into two and resume describing the Lodge and the travellers we met in the next post. Hold your breath if you like, the post will follow immediately tomorrow.