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Published: August 28th 2009
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After having some breakfast at the hostel in Pakse, we again got the same contraption to the ‘local bus station’. The guesthouse owner informed us that ‘bus’s’ left on the hour and would only take about an hour to get to Champasak.
We arrived at the bus station around 8:45am, giving ourselves a bit of time to find the bus; we then realized that the ‘local bus station’ was more like a large cluster of buses in the midst of a market. Our driver pointed to the ground and said in broken English that this was where we should wait for the bus to Champasak. Sarah and I were the only westerners in sight and solicited a few strange looks from the locals. The buses are not what a westerners would typically call a bus, but rather are known as ‘sawngthaews’ - converted flat-bed trucks, which the drivers pack as many passengers as they can on to two parallel benches. And in our case, not just people but also all of the locals purchases from the market. Women and men winded in and out of the buses selling anything from live pigs, which they pulled from rice sacks, to eggs,
fresh fruit and household items.
Sarah and I were the first to get on the bus and sat patiently observing the goings-on. We waited for an hour and a half and in this time we watched…Two elderly women receive 7 minute manicures while seated on the benches. One of them was still purchasing items during her beauty treatment. Grabbing small bags of eggs through the iron bars of the bus, which Sarah and I assumed were hard boiled eggs. Much to our dismay it was not just yoke in the middle but we actually refused to believe that we saw feathers in the middle. We were later informed that chicken embryos are a delicacy in Lao. We watched as large bags of eggplants were loaded, a huge laundry hamper of bananas, and various sacks of items for which the names we don’t know. By the time we were ready to leave there were at least a dozen people on the bus, mostly locals but a few other travelers joined us for the ride as well. We were all packed in with various items attached to the roof, as well as tucked under the benches, in between our legs and
hanging from the bars of the bus.
We thought we were in clear when we pulled away from the dusty station, but we were wrong again. We stopped various times along the way, including the local butcher where one woman purchased beef that had been sitting in the sun for hours, accompanied by a small bag of blood. She inspected her purchases in the cozy back seat of the truck, enough to make Sarah and I feel a little queasy!
We finally made it to the Mekong and drove on to a make shift ferry that would take us to the adjacent bank. We drove for a short while on the other side, and hopped off the bus at one of the guesthouses perched on the river. By this point it was noon and we had begun our journey before 9am that morning. Sarah and I cleaned ourselves up and decided to get some food and then visit the Khmer ruins. We were both exhausted from our overnight bus journey and our local bus experience, but wanted to see the ruins that day as we had planned to head to Si Phan Don the next morning for some
R&R.
We rented a motorbike to make the 10km journey to the UNESCO World Heritage site, Wat Phou. Feeling a bit more confident than my first scooter trip in Ko Pha Ngan, I drove with Sarah on the back. However, this bike was manual and I had to learn to shift the gears with my feet, the guesthouse owner neglected to show me this maneuver. Sarah and I set off in first gear for the first couple kilometers, with locals looking on as the bike was revving up the road. Swallowing my pride, we stopped and I asked a local person how to switch gears, he was happy to help and let out a bit of a laugh at our incompetence. We made it the rest of the way safely in 3rd gear, having to dodge potholes and cows along the way.
The ruins were absolutely amazing and were covered in bright green moss, nestled into the mountainside. We climbed up steep steps to the main temple stupa which housed a Buddha sculpture. We then made our way back safely in the late afternoon and rested in the guesthouse before venturing out for dinner.
Champasak itself is
a one road town with only a few guesthouses and shop fronts, it’s quite a sleepy little town, with travelers staying for a day or so to visit the ruins. Sarah and I definitely felt like we had strayed from the pack of young travelers that were covering a similar route. Most people our age seemed to not make it farther south than Vientiane, leaving at least a 1/3 of the country untouched. That night we made our way along the dark road to one of the only restaurants open.
We opted to try a local Lao barbeque, similar to a Korean barbeque, but in reality actually quite different. We had a small grill placed in the middle of the table, which had a small moat of chicken broth around it. You place the small pieces of meet on the grill, and place shredded cabbage, sprouts and glass noodles into the boiling moat. The meal was slightly sketchy and not all that satisfying, but the couple of bottles of ‘BeerLao’ (local Lao brew) made up for it. It was just after 10pm when we arrived at our hostel to find the large cast iron gate locked and a middle
age couple contemplating their options. The four of us scaled the wall next to the gate and hopped over, feeling like teenagers sneaking in after curfew.
The next morning we woke up early and took a boat back to the other side of the river, where we waited in hopes that the mini-bus we booked would pick us up. After a short wait we were picked up and then drove for 2 hours to where we boarded another boat to the small island of Don Det, one of the many small islands littering the southern part of the Mekong.
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