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| February 8, 2003, Pakse, Laos. It was January 31st and Chinese (and Vietnamese) New Year's Eve so we were hopeful for some serious celebrations (our guidebook warned us for the fireworks battleground). But there was absolutely nothing going on. Apparently fireworks had been banned in Pakse a year or so before. So the celebrations were all done in-house. We did snack on the nice coconut candy that is made for the festival. New Year's Day was pretty quiet |
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| as most business were closed for 3 days. We headed out of town with the intent to come back in a week's time. At the bus station we were fortunate to find a pick-up chartered by a large Thai family all the way to Champasak, which involved a delightful ferry crossing over the Mekong. There we found a small guesthouse with bamboo bungalows with fan and bath and we had lunch with the peaceful scenery of the river. The afternoon we took a moto rickshaw to visit the Angkor-period ruins of Wat Phu. Some of the buildings were still standing, but you had to scramble on fallen rocks to get a close access. With the end-of-day light we had a nice view of the old stone carvings. This gave us a good idea of what to expect of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, our destination after Laos. It was quite a steep hike all the way up the mountain to get to the upper pavilions, but somehow I managed to get there and the view of the surrounding scenery was worth it. |  |
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| And on we went, always further south on Route 13... we boarded a super crowded bus with standing room only for the next 3 hours (we still don't understand how I managed to survive that!). Were dropped off in a small village and soon caught another old truck-bus over a very bumpy path to get to one of the last villages in | ||||||||||||||||||
| Laos. There we got on a boat with some other travelers and were ferried through a maze of low, bushy islands to the island of Don Kohn, part of the famous Si Pahn Don (4000 Islands) that are located in the last stretch of the Mekong in Laos. These islands have been "discovered" by the backpacker crowds and now some of them have many guesthouses, mostly offering bamboo huts with hammocks. When we got there we first had lunch and Mommy went as usual for her round of the guesthouses. She found one with attached bath and we relaxed the rest of the day. Besides relaxing, Don Kohn is also known for the large Mekong waterfalls. The French actually built a railway on the island (the only one in Laos) to allow river cargo to circumvent the falls. The falls were worth seeing (as were the people fishing next to them), but there were still larger ones to come. We also hiked the length of the island through dried up rice fields and got to a beach from where you sometimes can see rare fresh-water dolphins. On our last night on the island we had a nice dinner in an expensive auberge (yummy fish!) and arranged the boat trip for the next morning. At night our hut was visited by 'Mickey' who had chewed a hole in our food bag and went for my crackers! Papa spent the night 'dancing with Mickey' before finally 'mouse-proofing' our food in the traditional camping style outside on the nearby rafters. | ||||||||||||||||||
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| At 7 am we packed our stuff, picked up our previously ordered bagged breakfast and took off in a long boat further south to the main falls. It was a beautiful boat-ride through the same maze of flooded vegetation as before with sometimes quite a swift current. After an hour we got on shore and hiked to where we could get a good view of the falls. Certainly more spectacular than the day before, but hey, Niagara, you're still the Queen of Falls! The boat then took us back upstream to the ferry landing where we were able to get our north-bound bus to the next destination: the elephant village... | ||||||||||||||||||
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