Tu Lan expedition day 1! Woo! I’ve been looking forward to this day so that I could actually take a look at all the gopro videos I shot during this trip. I glanced through them after the hike, but the good byproduct of this blog was making me actually watch videos.

::Half hour goes by::

And now after a half hour of looking for these videos, I can’t find them. I really hope they are on a hard drive at home. If they are not, I will be sad. But not that sad, cause I obviously didn’t care enough to watch them for the past 2 years.

Forging ahead, I broke my rule of writing my blog before I left the house this morning. I woke up late this morning again at 8:30am. Day light savings really effed with me this time around. I stopped setting an alarm clock a few months ago, just naturally waking up between 6 to 7:30am. But now, I wake up at 7ish, and it’s dark and my body is confused so I just sleep more. I will break this cycle.

FORGING ahead again, I’m sorry. I’m so distracted right now. My mind is being split into a million different places. This is what happens when I’m trying to write with all these other distractions. Hm, maybe this is why people do stuff first thing in the morning, before their head gets filled with other non-important tasks, like doing tasks at work, or doing taxes. Stupid stuff like that.

Gosh, I side tracked again. If you’re still reading this, I apologize. Okay, just very quickly, first day was awesome. Started the actual hike around 10am walking 2.5 km’s through the peanut and buffalo fields to the Rao Nan River.

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After crossing the river, we got to experience our first cave, called the Secret Cave. We go through this and continue forward with a trek to Hung Ton Cave entrance. Got to eat lunch at the entrance of Hung Ton. The picture on the bottom right is actually the location of one of the scenes from King Kong.

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From Hung Ton, we hike through the jungle to the Tu Lan Campsite. This campsite is right at the entrance of the Ken Cave, first made famous by a National Geographic article in January 2011. The entrance of this cave is actually a waterfall. In order to see the cave, you have to walk past the waterfall (there is a path), then swim into the cave before you climb out onto land and continue the exploration.

I really wish I had my videos. It’s really something to experience swimming into the dark. And it’s also scary swimming out of the cave, cause it’s only darkness behind you.

And this day is when my American arachnophobia was somewhat cured. Spiders in the states are small. Spiders in the jungle are large and you see their eye balls glistening in the dark before you see their bodies. I was climbing up some rocks and I just happened to glance at my hand as I was getting up, and next to it was something larger than my hand. Yes, it was a spider. Yes, I was scared. Yes, I might have peed, but luckily I was already wet from swimming.

We got to explore pretty deep into the cave. I think maybe an hour or so in, we turned around and headed back to camp. Again, we had to swim to exit the cave. When I think about how dark that water was, that I couldn’t touch the bottom, and that behind me was just darkness, I wonder how I did that. Adrenaline is quite something, eh?