Day 27 Elephant Falls

31/03/13
I had a crepe with honey for breakfast and it was a serious sized crepe, it was easily over a foot wide. Today was another one of those days where we hired bikes, they only had fully automatic bikes which was lame but better than nothing. Rob sped off towards the petrol station (which was about a km away), he took the wrong turn and wasted time waiting or us, whilst George and I filled up our bikes and headed back to the hotel to find Rob. Together we were then escorted back to the petrol station, by our hotel manager and then pointed in the right direction to find Elephant Falls (an impressive water fall, about 30m by 30m). The road there was also incredibly memorable, it took us mainly through pine forests with a drop down one side, leaving us with wicked views, it also had more twists in it than an Agatha Christie novel which made enjoyable riding. At the falls we walked down some pretty dodgy steps to near the bottom, where we entered a cave that emerged pretty much underneath the fall, so we stripped down to our swim shorts and walked out along some rocks as far as we dared, we were drenched within seconds and provided entertainment for a couple of German tourists. At the very bottom Rob and I swam in a pool (about 5 foot deep), even out of the main flow there was still a noticeable current. After a slog back to the top we asked for directions to a good restaurant that was near. Apparently just 50m down the road  there was such a restaurant, it was foul, there were tables with food remains on which were swamped by flies, totally engulfed, one table must have had 50 flies on it, needless to say it didn't take us long to decide to go elsewhere. Another 200m up the road we found another restaurant, unfortunately the menu was in Vietnamese, so it was lucky dip yet again. We ended up with 2 vegetable dishes, an omelette type thing and rice, add onto that 3 cans of coke and it only came to £3.80, but as George said "the only time I would order something without meat in at a restaurant is when I can't read the menu", I couldn't agree more. We hadn't left the restaurant long before it started to rain, it didn't take long for this rain to become torrential, it was so bad we couldn't even see so we pulled over and sheltered in a local's covered driveway and were invited in. The rain turned into a proper storm, ripping a neighbour's roof clean off and sent it flying into a tree, finally (after nearly an hour) the rain eased off and we helped reclaim the metal roof, we were rewarded with a strange fruit, it tasted a lot like mango but it didn't look vaguely like one. 5 miles up the road there hadn't been a drop of rain, clearly it had been extremely localised. We went back to the hotel to drop a few things off, including George then went out for another ride, this time along more mountain roads, for about 30km, it was tiring work as it was very busy and you had to keep your wits about you constantly. Dinner was one of the best meals we have had so far and we didn't pay stupid amounts for it either which is always a bonus. Tomorrow we move on, hopefully to find better weather!