Being Me, at Pak Ou.

Everyone who knows me realises I can never resist a mystery and so here, at Pak Ou, you won't be surprised to hear I went into Instant Sleuth Mode.

The entire Pak Ou Caves complex struck me as too ancient and too resonant to have ever been anything other than Sacred. Tham Theung in particular has absolutely the best echo and you yearn to chant and beat drums and go all primal with your dancing, and so I bet myself it was always, from the first humans arriving in the area, used in ancient fertility rites.

So that was the mystery I wanted to solve. Was Pak Ou ever a centre used by Shamans in truly ancient nomadic Mesolithic times? And later, in the Neolithic era, worshipping, say, the Rice Goddess? You remember the 10,000 year old Rice Goddess statue I came across at the Chen Family Ancestral Village in Guangzhou? Well, that's who I went looking for at Pak Ou Caves.

To this end, I was all sinister and snapped photographs everyplace, particularly in nooks and crevices and up high where no one could see, sticking my camera around corners and making it "boldly go where no man has gone before". And it wasn't wasted because I actually discovered a great deal of very interesting stuff. Let me show you:

An older god?

There are hundreds of these strange figurines hidden around the place, in niches in particular, or hidden in among the larger Buddha statues. And most of them don't seem very old, which is very "mmmmm!" indeed.

But here's something even cooler. Flashing walls in the pitch-blackness of the Upper Cave, here's what I discovered.

Cave paintings.

Most of the walls are covered in soot from millennium of fires but in places that aren't soot-covered, you can see drawings like these.

But they're not the Rice Goddess, right?

But here's something I discovered flashing my camera high up out of range of human gaze:

She's old indeed!

And around a corner inside a low-down nook:

The Rice Goddess?

Do you recall how, many years ago now, I used to refuse to take a camera on my travels, because I said photographing stopped you really seeing stuff? Well, although I still think that's true, Pak Ou Caves have taught me there's an entirely new use for a camera: it helps you to see things you wouldn't normally see at all.

And how cool is that?