Saturday, December 11, 2021
7:51 a.m. Room 21
Tha Song Yang Hill Resort Hotel
Tha Song Yang, Thailand
It’s almost eight a.m. this morning, and that is late for me to be enjoying my first cup of coffee of the day. But I’m glad I slept in. I feel good, much better than I did when I first woke up at five. I almost got up then, but my eyes felt a bit sore. It felt too early. So, I forced myself to stay in bed. And I counted backwards from one hundred dozens of times before I finally fell asleep. That’s a technique that I’ve developed recently.
Perhaps I needed that much sleep because yesterday was such a challenging day. I put out a lot of energy, and even though I only went to two places, it feels like I did a lot. A big part of that is that I really committed to this idea of setting up a camera either ahead of me or behind me and filming sequences as if there was a film crew hiding around the corner. I made a ton of mistakes doing that, and I can see now how I can improve my tecnique. I haven’t reviewed the video in full, but I did look briefly at a couple of clips, and I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in them. They didn’t look as dramatic as I expected, but perhaps when it is all put together, it will be pleasing.
My main goal for the day was to visit the Mae Usu Cave. But to get there, I plotted a route on a small road that went down to the shores of the Moei River first and then turned northwest to follow the river. I wasn’t sure I would be able to reach the Mae Usu Cave from that direction, but I thought it would be interesting to see the river. And I doubled down on that idea when I rode into town to buy some extra batteries. I wanted to make sure that I had enough batteries for my headlamp for when I went into the cave. And on the way out of town, I came across a beautiful lookout point that showed the mountains across the river in Myanmar, and the mountains looked immense. They were so high that I think they really qualified for the mountain name. They were much more than hills, and the view was dramatic. I thought it would be quite something to get that same view but right down at the shores of the Moei River. I spared a few thoughts for whether it was wise to go to the river. It serves as the border between Myanmar and Thailand, and with borders come border patrols and police and soldiers and perhaps a certain amount of casual lawlessness. But I decided I could at least give it a try.
Getting ready for this caving expedition was far more involved than I expected. I don’t exactly have outdoor gear or caving equipment, but I went through my various bags to see what items might come in handy inside a cave. An issue with the Mae Usu Cave is that it still has a major river running through it. I wasn’t able to track down much information about it, but it appeared that to at least go into this cave, you had to wade through the river. And you might have to wade down the river for the entire distance. And who knows how deep the water would get? Water always complicates matters, and I wondered how I can go into this cave with all my camera gear and smartphones and keep at least some of it dry. Unfortunately, I don’t have any kind of a working drybag. I only brought one waterproof stuff sack with me on my trip to Myanmar, and that is still the only bag that I have. But the waterproofing has long since disappeared. It is now no more waterproof than a cotton pillowcase. In the end, I had to admit that I really couldn’t waterproof my gear. I certainly couldn’t do any waterproofing if I wanted to use my GoPro Hero 9 with the Rode Wireless Go microphone. To waterproof that camera, I’d have to dismantle my rig and put the watertight battery compartment door back on. I always carry that door with me, so I could put it back when I got to the cave. And I made sure to put the waterproof door on my GoPro Hero 7 before I left. And then I put my smartphone inside a waterproof smartphone bag. On top of that, I had the duffel bag that I could put my knapsack into it. That would be useful for emergencies, but I don’t know that it would do me any good in the cave, because it would be awkward to carry.
In short, I really wasn’t able to prepare for serious river caving. But I was hoping this cave would be more of a tourist-level cave and not one meant for professionals. With that in mind, I prepared my gear as best I could, and I put together those few items that might come in handy in case there was a problem. So, I made sure to pack my extra rope and straps and emergency tape. And I packed my Swiss Army Knife. And I got extra batteries. And I packed bandaids. And I brought two liters of water. And that was about the best I could do.
It also took more time than it should have to prepare my camera gear. You would think that by this point and with the amount of camera gear I have, it should be simple, easy, and fast. It should be automatic. But it isn’t. The problem is that I’m still switching over from a stable life to one on the road. And it’s possible to do all kinds of things with cameras in a stable life that you can’t do when you are on the road. And I found myself all mixed up about which cameras to use to do what. Plus, I wanted to try out this new technique of filming myself from a distance. And I wasn’t sure how to handle that.
But I was finally ready to go. My original idea was to film and then edit a kind of preparations montage. I wanted to do all those quick cuts to show me putting new batteries into my flashlight, waterproofing my gear, getting rope and bandaids ready. But I had taken so long to get ready that I didn’t bother. Plus, I didn’t know how to film that. And when the moment came, it struck me as a bit of a YouTube cliche. I had just started watching some travel vlogs from a new guy a friend had told me about. I just checked his blog, and I learned that his name is Kevin. He’s an American. His YouTube channel is called 30 And A Wake Up. And his YouTube About page description says that he is “Retired military, turned lawyer, turned full time traveler. He has a blurb on his blog that tells his life story. It says that he is from St. Louis, Misouri. He jointed the US Navy in 1994, spent twenty years in the military, and retired in 2015. He then went to law school. He graduated from law school and began work as a lawyer in New York City. But he decided to leave that career and “travel full time as a travel vlogger and blogger.” He started with the goal to wake up somewhere new every thirty days. And that’s why he called his channel “30 And A Wake Up!” This name is also connected to this time in the military, where the final day of any tour was called a “wake up”. I wonder how that has worked out for him. I’m guessing that he regrets that name choice to a certain extent. It’s a complicated and confusing name for one thing. I imagine he has to explain it all the time. Plus, I doubt very much that he can stick to going to a new country every thirty days. But he didn’t actually say new country every thirty days. He said “somewhere new every thirty days.” And somewhere new can be anything – a new city, a new province, a new neighborhood, even a new hotel. And then it would be easily possible. With that broader definition, he could be somewhere new every week easily if not every day. But with that broad definition, it becomes somewhat meaningless as a goal and as a name.
Anyway, I was watching a couple of his videos, and I saw these Casey Neistat-style sequences where he was filming in POV fashion the opening of door handles and the pushing of buttons and that kind of thing. I’ve seen that done so many times by so many YouTuber vloggers that it has become very much a cliche. The usual thing, of course, is to film the coffee-making process with quick cuts. I’ve seen that a thousand times. And then the door-opening and car-door opening and inserting keys sequences are equally common. I saw Kevin filming that sequence a few times, and my idea of filming my getting-ready montage felt too much like a cliche. Plus, I already had this idea to film myself all day along from a distance, and that new technique was enough for one day. I didn’t want to complicate my life further by adding another unfamiliar technique.
My first attempt at this technique was a complete failure. I set up the camera outside my hotel room and aimed it at the door and at the scooter. The idea was to film myself leaving the room, getting on the scooter, and then riding away. However, when I reviewed the clip later on, I saw that I had somehow put a big pillar between the door and the camera. And you don’t see me come out of the room at all. All you see is the pillar. But I did capture me putting on my helmet, starting up the scooter, and riding away. And then I stopped and went back and got the camera. Next, I mounted the camera on the entrance gate to the hotel. Then I rode my scooter back up the hill into the resort, turned around, and rode down a second time and rode past the camera, as if I was leaving to turn onto the highway. Then I went back and got the camera and put it across the highway. Then I went back and got on the scooter and did the actual ride again and turned onto the highway and rode past the camera. Then I stopped and went back and got the GoPro.
It turned out there were two problems with this approach. One is that I used the same camera all the time. I had this idea that I wanted to keep the look of the video identical, so I didn’t want to switch between cameras. The video from the GoPro Hero 9 looks different from the video of the Hero 7. So I didn’t want to switch between them in rapid cuts. I thought it would look strange. So, I used the Hero 9 only for this. But that meant that all day long I had to remove the Hero 9 from the scooter grip and put it back again. And this is a complicated process involving the Jaws Flex Clamp and a bunch of wire. While in Mae Sot, I kept thinking about buying a second mounting system that I could leave on the scooter permanently. And then I wouldn’t have to mess around with the Jaws. But I never got around to it. Now I wish that I had. Taking the Hero 9 off the scooter and putting it back on again every time I wanted to film one of these sequences was complicated and tiring and time-consuming.
The other problem is that I left the Rode Wireless Go microphone around my neck while the receiver was still on the Hero 9. And every time I rode away from the Hero 9, the microphone would cut out. It needs line-of-sight to work. And my body can’t be between them. So now I have all these video clips where the audio keeps dropping out. When I edit these portions, I will probably have to do a lot of fancy clipping in order to deal with all the portions with dead audio. Or I will have to play music instead of using ambient audio. It was a big mistake.
At one point during my day, I realized that this was happening, and I thought the solution could be to leave the microphone on the GoPro along with the receiver. In fact, that audio might even be more natural because it would capture the sound of the scooter as it rode up to the camera and then past it. With the microphone around my neck, the audio is always of me right on the scooter. And therefore, the levels never change. It always captures the same loud sound of the roar of the scooter engine whether I am two hundred feet from the camera or two feet from it. And that’s kind of weird when you think about it. I’ll have to do some fancy editing to deal with that problem as well.
At this point, I can’t even imagine how these sequences will work out. I kept doing it for the entire day, even on the highway. I wanted to get some video of me riding the scooter on the highway, so I attached the GoPro to road signs at certain spots. Then I turned around and rode back up the highway, turned around again, and then rode past the GoPro. And then, of course, I had to turn around one more time, ride back along the highway past the GoPro on the other side, turn around a fourth time and then go back to the sign and pick up the GoPro. It was a lot of work.
I did this at intersections as well. When I got to the road where I turned left to go down to the river, I attached the camera to a sign on that road. Then I went back out onto the highway and recreated the turn. And this time, I did something different. I rode my scooter right up to the camera, got off the scooter, and then I walked in front of the camera and spoke into it. Then I got back onto the scooter and continued riding past it. The hope is that it feels natural. And, of course, once I rode past the GoPro, I had to stop, get off the scooter, go back and get the camera, reattach it to the scooter grip with the Jaws and the wire and continue on.
Some of the situations I ran into were quite funny. The road I started to follow to go to the river became very rough very quickly, and I decided to film a part of it. This time, there were no convenient gates or signs for the camera. So I used the Jaws Flex Clamp to attach the GoPro to a thin branch of a tree. It was the only place available. Then I turned the scooter around and rode all the way back to the top of a long and very rough hill. And then I recreated my ride down that hill. But it turned out that the Jaws hadn’t held on firmly enough, and the entire rig had drooped down. The GoPro was filming the ground and not the road this entire time. So I had to reattach the GoPro firmly and then go back up the hill a second time and come back down it for the third time. And then when I reviewed the video, it looked super ordinary. While riding the scooter, it felt dramatic. The road was incredibly rough. It felt like an exciting moment on a scooter journey of epic proportions. But the video looks like some funny doofus hunched over his scooter and just riding down a hill. Seriously, what is the big deal? If anything, I looked kind of silly because I think I look too big on the scooter. When you ride a scooter or a motorcycle, you have this image of how cool and awesome you must look. It’s a bit of a wake-up call to see actual video of that moment and see that you are decidedly uncool.
The road from that point to the river became epic. There is no other word for it. I’ve been riding on a lot of tough and interesting roads lately, but this road was the most dramatic of the bunch. It would have been perfect, I thought, for this technique of capturing myself riding my scooter up steep grades, through mud, and through deep pools. However, I couldn’t do any of that. And that’s because I had picked up a voluntary and somewhat unwanted guide. A local man on a motorbike had stopped to talk to me, and whatever his intentions or desires, he appointed himself my guide on this road. He kept saying something in Thai, but I had no idea what it meant. With hand gestures he seemed to be indicating the road ahead and how I should follow him. He seemed to be offering to take me somewhere or show me something. With no other information to go on, I just assumed he meant he wanted to show me his farm or his village, perhaps take me back to his house to meet his family. What else could it be? In any event, he stuck to me like glue. He rode ahead and then indicated that I should follow. He rode much faster than I could, and he had to stop and wait constantly for me to catch up. And the road became very dramatic. I wanted so badly to stop and set up the GoPro so that I could film myself riding it, but I was now chained to my self-appointed guide. I was already delaying him and making him stop to wait for me over and over again. It would have felt rude to now just stop and start filming myself like I was on some kind of wilderness adventure TV show. I can’t imagine what my new friend would have thought about that.
With all this going on, I had no choice but to simply film the ride as normal with the GoPro pointing forward from the scooter grip. And, of course, the GoPro chose that moment for the battery to die. Now I had to choose between not filming this road and delaying my guide even more by making him wait while I changed the battery. I happened to be using the GoPro Media Mod, so changing the battery was a long and difficult procedure. Plus, I had been shooting in 4K, and the memory card was almost full. And I’m still struggling with that because my memory cards are still full with all the video I shot in Sukhothai. And I knew it would take me a long time to rummage through my gear and find a memory card with some available memory. I was reluctant to stop, and I rode for a while without filming anything. And it was agony. I saw what I thought was amazing scenery going by, and I wasn’t getting any video of it. I finally had to stop and change the battery and memory card. And my new friend stopped and waited patiently for me to finish. I was very self-conscious as I did this because I was aware of just how complicated this procedure was. To remove the GoPro from the Jaws Flex Clamp and then open up the GoPro Media Mod and change the battery and memory card and then put it all back together is a very long and complex procedure. It’s something that normally takes all my attention, and I have to think carefully as I do it and take my time and be methodical. It’s even more challenging when you are doing this on a steep and rugged mountain road in the full heat of the day. And now I was doing all this while my new friend was waiting patiently. And then two other men came up on motorbikes, and all three of them stood around to watch this strange foreigner fiddling with his GoPro. It’s a miracle I didn’t drop a memory card into the mud or lose a thumb screw in the rocks or tall grass and never find it again. But eventually, I got the whole procedure done, and we were on our way again.
In the end, I had no idea why this man stuck with me for so long or what he thought he was doing. Everything he did only made sense if he was taking me to his farm, to his village, or to his house. But he didn’t do any of that. The road simply went to the river, as I knew it did. And we both ended up at the river’s edge. And as far as I could tell, he had nothing to do there. We simply spent some time at the river, and then he left. He didn’t do anything while he was there, and he didn’t show me anything. He didn’t take me anywhere. And he hadn’t guided me there. It’s not like he knew the way to the river and I didn’t. When he met me, I was on the road going to the river. He seemed to be asking me at that time where I was going, and I told him that I was going to the river. I was already on my way there on that road. So it wasn’t like he made the suggestion and brought me there. He just rode ahead of me on the road.
I suppose it should come as no surprise to note that his man was probably drunk. I smelled heavy alcohol on his breath every time he got close. This always happens. In most countries around the world, when a local person is overly eager to get friendly and really gets in your face and glues himself to you, they are almost always drunk. And they are always drunk men. It’s a very common occurrence. It has happened to me countless times every place I’ve ever been. And I’m never very happy about it. I always find drunk people to be quite boring.
The only other thing going on is that he kept talking about how he had to go to the hospital. Even as we rode together to the river, he mentioned the hospital every time we stopped and tried to chat a bit. I couldn’t imagine that there was any kind of a hospital ahead of us on this road. I knew there was a big hospital in Tha Song Yang, but we were far away from that town. And I thought it was possible, maybe, that there was a medical clinic down by the river or somehwere along this road. Maybe that’s where he was going. But we both arrived at the river, and there was clearly nothing there. And then after our visit to the river, he talked again about the hospital. And he seemed to want me to go with him. Obviously, given the situation, a reasonable assumption is that he wanted me to go with him to the hospital and then pay for whatever treatment, procedure, or medicine he required. Perhaps right from the very beginning when he saw me on the road, he came up with this idea to get money from me, and all this talk about a hospital was a way to do that. I don’t want to be cynical, but that’s probably what was going on. And perhaps in his mind, we had made a deal. He would guide me to the river, and then I would pay his medical bills in return. Something like that. That’s my only explanation. But, of course, I had no interest in going with him to the hospital. My plan for the day was to come to the river and then go to the Mae Usu Cave. The hospital in Tha Song Yang was far away in the opposite direction.
The time eventually came when he was getting back on his motorcycle, and he was encouraging me to go with him again. And I wanted to separate myself from him. I wanted to spend a few minutes alone by the river to enjoy the stunning scenery. And I wanted to make the drive back along that amazing road by myself so that I could continue my little project of filming myself from a distance. He kept mentioning the hospital and he indicated with hand gestures that it was time for me to get on my scooter and follow him there. But I pretended to not really understand, and I simply agreed with him that, well, if he needed to go to the hospital, then go to the hospital. I wasn’t holding him back. I indicated that I was going to stay at the river, and I said goodbye. At this point, I assumed he would switch tactics and just come right out with a request for money. But he never did. He didn’t seem unhappy or disappointed that I wasn’t coming with him. He just mentioned the hospital a couple more times. And then he started up his motorycle and rode away.
Despite picking up this awkward companion along the way, my visit to the river was both interesting and enjoyable. The road itself, as I mentioned, was incredible. It was a true jungle road in some places. And in some places it got so rough that, as always, I considered turning back. But I’m very glad that I didn’t. When the road ended at a bit of sand by the river’s edge, I was presented with a stunning view. The river was wide and moving fast, and on the other side, the immense mountains of Myanmar dominated the horizon. According to Google Maps, the mountain peak there is called Mela Taung. I don’t know what the mountain range is called, but it stretches for a long distance both north and south. This section of it struck me as the highest portion.
And I happened to arrive at the river’s edge at the same moment that a bit of cross-border informal trade was going on. It turned out that the two other men I had seen on the jungle road on motorcycles were on their way to meet with a boat coming from Myanmar carrying some goods. Just a few minutes after I arrived at the river, I heard the sound of a boat motor, and a small boat with a single man on board came into view going upriver against the current. The young man pulled the boat onto the riverbank where we were, and four large bags were taken from the boat and strapped down on the two motorbikes. The bags looked strange to me from a distance. They were clearly very heavy, as the men had difficulty handling them. But they also looked soft and gushy. And then I was told that they contained buffalo meat. Apparently, a carabao had been slaughtered on the Myanmar side of the river, and four bags of the meat were brought here to be sold in Thailand. I didn’t see any money change hands, but I assume they can get a much better price for the meat here as opposed to in Myanmar. The fact that the bags contained fresh meat made sense when I saw that they had left bright red patches of liquid on the boat. It was clearly the blood from the carabao.
I had spent some time near informal border crossings on this same river when I was in Myanmar. And at that time, people seemed to be bothered by my presence and by my camera. But these men had no issues at all with me being there. And they were perfectly happy to let me film them as the bags of meat were offloaded and strapped to the motorcycle. I was very happy to have this experience. It added a spice and excitement to my trip to the river. I was lucky to arrive there just at the moment this transaction was taking place.
My ride back out along the jungle road was a lot of fun. I did my best to set up the camera at particularly interesting spots to capture some shots of me actually riding the scooter. How well or poorly that turns out will be a surprise when I get around to editing it. I can see now that I should have used two cameras instead of just one. Who cares that the video from the second camera would look different? I could use the Hero 7, and that would look roughly similar to the Hero 9. Or I could even use the Panasonic LX10. It would provide nicer video. It would look different from the Hero 9, but maybe that isn’t a bad thing. After all, I’m not shooting for National Geographic. I don’t have to pretend that I’m making professional videos here. I had the Hero 7 with me. It was even mounted on my GoPro Max Grip tripod. It would have been a lot easier to set up that camera at the side of the road than to remove the Hero 9 from the scooter each time and then put it back again. The one problem that introduces is audio. I’d have to rig up the Hero 7 with better audio. Or I’d have to continue to use the Rode Wireless Go with the Hero 9. I’d shoot video with both cameras at the same time and then I’d have to sync up the audio from the 9 with the video from the 7. I’ve done that in the past, and it works, but it is time consuming. Now that I think about it, the better approach would be to record separate audio. I can use the GoPro Media Mod with the 9. And then I can use the Mic Adapter with the 7 and plug in a lav mic or a shotgun mic. I’ll try that the next time I use this technique.
I continued to film myself all the way along the jungle road. I mounted the GoPro Hero 9 on trees, on bushes, on bamboo, and on the ground with a mini tripod. That was a lot of work, but I enjoyed doing it. It made the trip much slower, of course, and by the time I got back to the main road, so much time had passed that I even thought about cancelling my plans to visit the Mae Usu Cave. Or I could just postpone it to the next day and then tack that video onto the end of this river road video. But I did my best to summon some energy, and I turned my scooter to the northwest and continued the ride to the cave. I continued to video myself from time to time, and I even tried out a different approach here and there. Once, I attached the GoPro to a highway sign, but instead of just riding past the GoPro, I stopped right in front of it and gave a kind of trip update on camera. And then I rode past it. That meant, of course, that I then had to turn around and go back and retrieve the camera. This wasn’t always easy because this road was very busy. There was a surprising amount of traffic on it.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but the road that I had intended to follow along the river to the cave was a complete bust. By the time I made it to the river on the jungle road, I kind of assumed that the road following the river would be too difficult to ride. And I was right. In fact, it wasn’t a road at all. It looked to have been abandoned and had turned back into an overgrown trail. There was no chance of riding a scooter down it. And even if you could, it wouldn’t make sense because the cave would have been on the opposite side of the hill range. And there would have been no way to get to the cave anyway. Going by the main highway and the main entrance road was the only realistic option for getting there.
The access road was very beautiful. In a way, it was going up along the same hill slopes that my jungle road had ascended, but it was wide and smooth. It was a real road, and it passed through some very pleasant villages. At the cave itself, I was disappointed to be staring at the now familiar closed-because-of-covid sign. Yet, the road to the cave was wide open. The sign said it was closed. But the road was open. I’ve noticed this pattern in Thailand, and it ties in with this idea that people have a great deal of energy when it comes to putting up signs. But there is less energy and less organization when it comes to taking them down. Therefore, all over Thailand and much of the world in fact, you see signs for events that ended years if not decades earlier. Signs go up advertising some business or event. The event can be over or the business can fail, but the signs will stay in place forever. And I’m starting to see that all the covid-19 signs and security shacks and road barriers are falling into that category. I think we will see covid-19 signs for many years even after the pandemic is over and the rules no longer apply.
In this case, I didn’t know if this sign was true or not, and I decided to simply ride down the road anyway and see for myself. And I still don’t know if the cave was closed. There were other tourists there. Local people had parked their scooters and trucks there, and a few people were milling about and taking selfies in front of the giant cave mouth and the river. However, the shack where you were supposed to buy tickets to go into the cave was empty. No one was there selling tickets. And there was another sign saying the cave was closed. Yet, there were no barriers anywhere.
I was undecided as to what to do for a while. At first, I made up my mind not to go into the cave at all. And I didn’t mind that. To be honest, the trip to the river combined with the new filming technique had exhausted me. My usual burst of morning energy had faded long ago, and I was tired. I didn’t have the energy to go into the cave or truly enjoy it. But just as I was thinking about leaving, I thought I might as well at least take a closer look at the entrance to the cave. I could follow the trail down to the shore of the river and at least look into the cave. And once I got there, it seemed a shame to be so close and not go into the cave at least a little bit. So I did that. And once I was inside the cave, I decided that that was enough. I even set up the GoPro for one last segment where I would walk up to the camera and then speak into it and end the official video for the day. I filmed that segment, and I was leaving the cave. But then I thought that I should at least wade through a bit of the river and see how far I can get before it gets too dark or too difficult. I had come all this way and made all this effort. It would be a shame not to take my cave experience that little bit farther.
And so I found myself wading out into the river and going deeper into the cave. And this wasn’t easy. The water wasn’t deep. It came up to just past my knees. But then I stepped into a couple of holes, and the water went up to my thighs. And the river bed got very muddy and rocky. It became difficult to move, and I worried that I would fall over and my entire knapsack of expensive gear would be destroyed. But I kept on.
And then I reached a point in the dark when I saw an interior cavern that was lit up. That really surprised me. Still far away and seemingly quite high up on the cave wall, I saw a cavern that had artificial lights. I became very curious about that, and I decided that I should try at least to reach that cavern. I was so curious about it. What was up there? Why did it have a lighting system? Why was the lighting system on when the cave was supposed to be closed? I used my headlamp to try to make out what was going on. In particular, I was trying to figure out how you got to the cavern. There had to be some kind of trail or ladder or rope system. But I couldn’t see anything. And this cavern was on the opposite side of the river that I was now on. I had crossed right over the river by this point. But to get to the cavern, I’d have to cross the river again. And I had no idea how deep the river was there.
And I was having a great deal of trouble walking. The mud and rocks had been so thick that a bunch of it had gotten between my feet and the sandals. And it was so painful that I couldn’t walk. I tried to remove all this mud and the stones, but I couldn’t get it out. I tried to remove the sandals, but so much mud had gotten into the buckles that they wouldn’t release. I struggled with this for a long time, even falling over into the mud as I did so. And I was trying desperately to keep the GoPro and the Rode Wireless Go out of the mud and the water. It was a disaster. While I did this, all my movement pushed my feet deeper and deeper into the mud. My left leg sunk down into the thick mud right up to my knee, and it was getting to the point that I risked not being able to get it out again. My sandals were acting like anchors on my feet, and when they went down into the mud, I couldn’t pull them out again. It might have been just barely possible to continue forward and make it to the other side of the river and figure out how to climb up to that cavern, but I decided it wasn’t wise. Physically, I could have done it. But this would be at great risk to my cameras and all my other gear. It’s hard to even describe how tough the conditions were. The mud was so deep and so thick that just taking one step was a major achievement. I decided not to any farther. By that point, just turning around and getting out of the cave was going to be challenge enough, and I’d barely gone inside any distance at all.
I managed to retrace my steps and get out of the deepest sections of mud. And then I spent some time removing as much of the mud from my sandals as possible. I worked on that for a long time until I was finally able to unclip the buckles. And then I could remove the sandals and clean them even more. And then I walked out of the cave in my bare feet. It was painful to walk on the stones in my bare feet, but it was much easier to get through the mud. Bare feet is the only way to really get through that mud.
I filmed one last section using the new technique. I made my way all the back to near the mouth of the cave, and I set my GoPro up on a rock. Then I turned around and went a far distance back into the cave. Then I walked back toward the GoPro, talking as I went, as if I was exiting the cave for the first time. And when I reached the GoPro, I officially ended the video. That was the end of my video of the trip to the river and the Mae Usu Cave.
I had to spend more time still in the river washing away as much of the mud as I could from legs, from my body, and from my gear. I reflected that in all of the reviews I’d read of this cave, no one had mentioned the mud. Perhaps the deep mud is a new wrinkle this Mae Usu Cave experience. Or maybe there was a way into the cave and along the river that avoided all the mud. I guess I needed a guide to figure all that out.
My scooter ride back to the resort passed smoothly and enjoyably. It went much faster now that I wasn’t stopping every kilometer to set up a camera. I spent the rest of the day and night up until about ten working on the video of my trip to Tha Song Yang. I ended up with nearly two hours of raw video of that trip. And I really wanted to have less video than that. By ten at night, I had reduced it to exactly one hour. I might have to leave it there, but I’m hoping to make it at least fifteen minutes, if not thirty minutes shorter.
A big problem for me is that even though my new room at the resort does have WiFi now, it’s really slow. There is no possbility of being able to upload any videos to YouTube from here. My plan for today is to devote the whole day to editing video. But even if I finish some videos, I won’t be able to upload them. I’ll have to wait until I’m in a nicer hotel that actually has working WiFi.