Pakse + Tadlo

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Southern Laos

The small town of Pakse didn't hold too much to capture our attention for too long so it wasn't long before we rented a hog and hit the road in search of some countryside. Although we did have a chance meeting with M-Dog of all people and we headed for a curry at a restaurant which had been recommended by Jamie who had just been through this area a few weeks before.

We set off for the smal village of Tadlo, 100km or so north of Pakse. The ride there went smoothly without a single wrong turn which was pretty good for us, although did include some classics such as asking in pretty much every single village along the way if we were going in the direction and just being stared or laughed at by the locals (in a friendly way, not the Indian stares of death way) and also pulling up to a toll booth and pulling out the wallet only to be angrily told to move on., all very confusing but needless to say we powered on. Plus our map did look like it had been drawn by a four year old so we were pretty happy when we finally saw signs for the village.

A waterfall and an elephant ride

We pulled into Tadlo and were greeted by a beautiful green village with waterfalls, cattles grazing by the riverside and friendly locals. Our hostel owner was very accomodating and let us park our hog round the back next to a mammoth custom-made concept bike that was on a 2000 mile test drive through europe and asia. Needless to say Paul felt very unmanly parking our tiny hog right next to it.

One of the local attractions was a two hour elephant ride around the area and another local village which we immediately signed up to do. The trek was awesome and took us into the outback (slightly worrying considering the amount of unexploded mines in the area that they kept banging on about), through a river (we were near 45 degrees at one point we seriously thought we were gonna end up in the soup) and straight through the middle of another village, and back through the river again near the waterfall, we also seemed to have a really rebelious elephant that kept trashing the fences along the path and stripping all the branches the whole way round, The elephant and Paul bonded fiercely.

That evening we spent playing with children down by the river before retiring to the quiet hostel for a drink before dark. The following day we packed our stuff back on to the hog to head back to Pakse before heading up to the capital and regretably away from the beautiful surrounds of southern Laos.

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Photos

Mirror, signal, err, mirror?
Looking good

Hut
Great hut

Our little friend
Paul named him Monty, blatantly wasn't his name