Pakse

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After leaving the Kong Lo cave we started what turned out to be the journey from hell (what else can be expected when travelling during the country's most important holiday). With the help of a local who spoke English we thought that the owner of the Eco Lodge in Kong Lo village had ordered us a minivan to take us to the street from where we could catch a local bus giong to Paske. It turned out that he hadn't and we had to take two of these truck style local busses to take us to that road. Each bus took more than one hour and was packed to the rim with locals, luggage, animals (3 puppies in a tiny crate with no food or water - horrible) and sacks of onions and other veggies. Just as we arrived there the bus came and we had to sit on plastic chairs in the aisle until we got our own seats. The bus took forever and kept stopping not only to drop people off but at every bus station and random food places on the way. The bus also didn't have aircon and as soon as we didn't move it became unbearable. At about 9pm the bus driver assistant turned the music up to full volume and shared Beer Lao with the whole bus including the driver. The way it works in Laos is that they poor you a glass and you have to drink it at once. This then gets repeated until everyone had their turn and then it starts again. It turned out that my friend and I got a lot more beer than the locals. The drinking resulted in even more stops for toilet breaks. At one point we fell asleep but woke up because the bus had stopped in some random village so the bus driver could sleep. We stood there for 2 hours without aircon. It was hard not to loose it (or face as they Asians would say).

We finally made it to Paske only to find that the guesthouse we wanted to stay only opens at 8am (it's quite common in Laos for guesthouses and hotels to shut at night and this should be considered when travelling at night). We checked into a place around the corner and typically, I choose the hottest room in the whole wide world.

Pakse is a stop over for many people to either go to the Bolovan Plateau or 4000 Islands. It's a small town with about 60000 inhabitants. There isn't much to do and because it was the start of Pi Mai most of the shops and restaurants were closed. I was desperately searching for a camera because mine got water damage during tubing but I wasn't very lucky with my search. My friends wanted to book tickets to go to Bangkok but also all the travel agents were shut. We went into one to check for tickets and they invited us to join them for their Pi Mai party. We had to drink a lot of beer and got splashed with water (ice cold down our necks!). We left after a short while only to be invited to join another party. On the way to get some beers we got invited by another party and the rest of the afternoon was spent alternating between parties. It was good fun - we splashed locals and tourists with buckets of water and hosepipes. The New Year's celebrations here are definitely more fun than back home!

We left Paske the next morning to travel to travel to 4000 Islands.

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