Empty and green, are our first impressions of Laos. The country has about the same population as NZ so is small compared to neighbouring countries (eg Thailand 63m, Vietnam 86m). Pakse, the capital of southern Laos, has a real small town feel to it and once you get outside the city it's rice paddies and green bush in all directions.
Being small and undeveloped, transport is the biggest challenge in Laos. A decade ago, the roads were just dirt tracks but now the main ones have been sealed. The low population means that public transport is often infrequent. On our second day in Laos we were going to go visit a waterfall near pakse, but by the time we had sorted ourselves out at 11am it was too late to go - we wouldn't have been able to catch a bus back because they don't run in the afternoons. The next day we were more organised and were there and back by lunchtime. The scenery around the waterfall was great and reminiscent of New Zealand's national parks.
From Pakse we headed south to do a loop of the major sights. Our first trouble was again with the bus - we got to the bus station early (7.30) but found that there were no buses until 10.30. We were talked into hiring a tuk tuk to take us the 60km to Kiet Ngong village. Kiet Ngong is very much a traditional Laos village, whose only real tourist attraction are the local elephants that they use in the fields. You can hire an elephant there to take you on a 90 minute ride to a ruined temple on the top of a hill overlooking the village and surrounding wetlands. At Kiet Ngong, we found that the lodge we were planning to stay at was closed until 1 July. There was no other accommodation in town so it's lucky we hired the tuk tuk. The helpful driver waited for us to do our elephant ride then took us on to where we were planning to go next. (This ended up working out for the best; the tuk tuk probably saved us two days in transport time what with the infrequent local buses.)
Our next stop was Don Daeng, an island in the Mekong river that has several villages on it. We were planning to stay at a community-run guesthouse, operated by a local village to encourage tourism income. The tuk tuk driver dropped us at the boat landing where we caught a 'ferry' to the island. Built to accommodate passengers and motorbikes, the ferry was two dugout canoes with some planks connecting them and an outboard motor attached. The ferry took us to the remote looking tip of the island where there were no signs of civilisation except for a path leading into the trees. Getting off the boat we headed up the path and found the village. Someone waved at us so we walked up and said 'guesthouse' in english and (poor) lao and it was all organised from there.
It turned out to be an interesting stay. The local organiser took us on a bicycle trip to a nearby village where we sat with him in the small market between the houses on stilts and watched local life happen. Later on we got a rural laos meal served to us outside our room, with vegetable soup, bony chicken and far too much sticky rice for us to eat. Bathing was best accomplished by washing in the Mekong.
After a night on the island we kept moving to the other side of the Mekong to a small town called Champasak. The town's main claim to fame is the ancient ruins of a temple complex dating from before the Angkor Wat temples in Cambodia. We bicycled out to the temples, successfully dodging both the thunderstorms and the hordes of tourists, so for us at least the temples had a remote atmosphere to them. Back at our guesthouse the rain started as soon as we returned our bikes, and we shared our small sheltered porch with a goat who seemed marginally more scared of the rain than he was of us. As the thunderstorms intensified the power went out and unlike other countries, didn't come back on after the rain stopped. It still wasn't going when we left the next day.
The last leg of our loop trip was returning to Pakse to catch an overnight bus to the capital, Vientiane. To catch a bus from Champasak we just had to stand outside our guesthouse early in the morning and flag down some local transport. It turned out that the one we flagged down wasn't a "real" bus but was loaded up with sacks of rice in sugar bags marked "made in Thailand" and was taking some paying passengers as well. The rice was surprisingly comfortable. On the trip our "bus" had to cross back across the Mekong to the main road. We were surprised to see that the car ferry was built on the same principles as the small boat that took us to Don Daeng, with a (more sturdy) wooden platform built across three boats. we assumed it was ok because no-one else looked concerned. In any case we made it across the river and back to Pakse safely, and having exhausted Pakse's sights earlier, spent the day sitting in a local restaurant reading our books waiting for the night bus to arrive.
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