Southern Laos

Coming into Lao we got different opinions from people that had already travelled there and most of them were rather sceptical about the south. As we went down in the main Route 13, the Mekong got bigger and the heat even more so. We sweated to the last drop of bottled water in the long bus rides along nicely paved roads, stopping every half hour to offload and upload endless amounts and diversity of THINGS, I guess it was a good way to cool the motor down as well. We passed Thakek, highly dull, sleepy and unexciting border town which had two main positive characteristics, a beautiful sunset over a full Mekong and buzzing truckloads coming in from Thailand in the morning. And on we go again on the sweating, bumpy ride, 7 hours down to Pakse which is the main city in the South. Its a nice place, with friendly customer oriented, service providing entrepreneurs: a very well English and French speaking guesthouse owner who studied in Poland "back in the days"; a friendly Indian running a restaurant, and I mean literally "running", and serving the best chicken tikka mesala around; nice local guys running an internet shop, who offer also international calls: "Hi mummy!". All in all, with the exception of Paxe, we found the people in the south equally shy and laid back as in the rest of the country, with only occasional incidents where you wonder if the language barrier is the only problem ;0) We visited the sixth century Temple of Wat Phou, a beautiful Khmer temple set in the foot of a hill dominating the whole area and similar to style and beauty but not magnitude to the Angkor temple.

We rented a motorbike and spend the last four days driving around the Bolaven Plateau. Cultivated by the French for farming because of its rich soil the plateau is amazingly undeveloped, growing mostly coffee and tea with small villages scattered along the road, pigs, chickens, smiling kids, pot-smoking old women, its all there, no deserted colonial villas though... we did not find a lost tribe but we enjoyed ourselves greatly and it was a refreshing breeze coming from the tens of waterfalls scattered around the plateau that kept us cool.

Our next destination is the 4000 islands, its an area on the border with Cambodia where the Mekong enlarges to a 14 km width where a lot of small and not so small islands emerge. We look forward to a couple of relaxing days and then we are in Cambodia.