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View Requirements >- Laos Visa Requirements to Visit Kong Lo Cave
- Chinese Visa Requirements to Visit the Temple of Heaven
Archive for June, 2011
Laos Visa Requirements to Visit Kong Lo Cave
June 13th, 2011
f you're looking to get off the beaten path in Laos, Matador Travel has an excellent recommendation: a visit to Kong Lo Cave in Phu Hin Bun National Park.
About 7 hours away from Vientiane if you're lucky, Kong Lo Cave was carved from the surrounding rock by an underground river. For a fee, you can tour the cave by boat, descending into the bowels of the earth and coming out the other side about 7 kilometers later. This video shows the end of one such boat ride.
Matador describes the ride into the cave as "like entering a mouth — stalactites like teeth, and the feeling that you’re going inside, riding inside, the body of the earth, organs frozen rock-hard. My torch casts a feeble glow into the black; mist rises from the water like ghosts."
On the other side, if you're so inclined,
Chinese Visa Requirements to Visit the Temple of Heaven
June 5th, 2011
As if you needed another reason to get a Chinese visa, UNESCO has one more for you: This month's featured World Heritage Site is located in Beijing and dates back to the Ming Dynasty. For almost 500 years starting in 1420, Chinese emperors worshiped at the Temple of Heaven, a staggeringly beautiful complex of temples and altars built according to Taoist principles. Here, the emperors performed prayers and ceremonies to ensure bountiful harvests and favorable weather for growing crops.
UNESCO calls it "a masterpiece of architecture and landscape design which simply and graphically illustrates a cosmogony of great importance for the evolution of one of the world’s great civilizations."
The Temple of Heaven stopped being used as such in 1911, when the ceremonies were forbidden by the
