Pakse

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A surprisingly comfortable overight journey (made bearable by copious snacking) saw me arrive in Pakse - the transport hub of the South. As you may well guess, anywhere that is defined as a transport hub doesn't really have that much going for it and Pakse is no exception. It's a town with a strange, deserted atmosphere. The roads are wide and in good condition but theres no traffic and the market is fairly new three-storey building which is only half full of shops. It's almost as if they expected a big boom in trade or tourism which never quite happened.

I decided, however, that it was worth hanging round for a couple of nights for the sake of visiting the Bolaven Plateau. The plateau is an area of high ground (duh) to the West of Pakse where they grow huge amounts of coffee (some of the best in the world apparently) and tea and boasts a plethora of impressive waterfalls.

My trip visited a couple of the waterfalls in the morning, both of which were very impressive. This was partially due to the huge amount of rain that had fallen the day before and overnight which made the waterfalls extremely powerful. The mist caused by one of them was enough to drench me from well above it! We then visited a coffee plantation and a tea plantation before stopping for lunch.

After lunch we saw yet another waterfall and the strangest minority village to date. The inhabitants of the village are not Buddhist but animist - they believe in the spirits and scrifice animals to keep them happy. An interesting feature of the village is that they believe that they know when someone is due to die, so they build their coffin in advance and store it under their house. Equally odd is the fact that the children in the village smoke from the age of around 4. They smoke a mixture of tabacco and chili from huge handmade pipes. Few of the adults seem to smoke as they have been told about the dangers of smoking, but they let the children do it because "they like it". I'm still not sure which is the most bewildering sight - a 5 year old child playing on a coffin that could potentially be his, or his little sister smoking a pipe almost as big as her!

The trip to the Bolaven Plateau was certainly worth an extra night in Pakse despite the town itself not being that appealing, but two nights there was enough before I continued South.

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