Laos Part I: Settling In (Pakse – Champasak – Savannakhet)

On February 15, we took our lives in our hands and boarded a Lao Airlines flight from Siem Reap in Cambodia to Pakse, Laos.  The airplanes are the same as those used on American Eagle services between Boston & NYC, so at least I felt the machinery was legitimate. We were 2 of about 12 passengers aboard (all Western), and we made it there with no problems other than a small freak-out on my part when on the descent I noticed we seemed to be flying through a very narrow mountain pass.

We arrived in Pakse, a non-descript town in southern Laos along the east side of the Mekong river, without much of a plan of what we were going to do or see during our stay in Laos, so we sketched out a rough itinerary and then booked our ticket out (yet another Lao Airlines flight) from Luang Prabang, a city in the north, for a date 17 days in the future. It took us some time to adjust to the uncertainty of what the upcoming weeks would look like – and even more so of how we’d make it happen – but after a few days we settled into a groove of going with the flow (especially with respect to transportation) and started to enjoy this particularly unusual leg of our trip.

After our overnight in Pakse, we hopped a sawng thaew (similar to the dala dala we took on Zanzibar) to the town of Champasak, grateful that they had recently completed a new road that made our ride a smooth 45 minutes instead of a bumpy 2 hours. Champasak is a very sleepy town on the west side of the Mekong, but we happened to be there during the annual Wat Phu Champasak festival, a 3-day to-do when people from around the region make a pilgrimage of the Wat Phu temple about 8km outside of town. We were worried about finding lodging during this ‘very busy’ period, but if what we found was the busy period, I can’t imagine what the low season (i.e. the other 362 days) look like.

Just us & the piggies

We wandered the ‘sights’ of Champasak – a couple temples – and especially got a kick out of 2 things: 1) the Unfinished Palace, a shell of a building left behind after the last king of Champasak was ousted; and 2) a shredded papaya salad we ordered for lunch, which sounds benign and potentially refreshing but to our surprise was full of chili heat!

Jason imagines what he could do with this space

The next day, we hopped on some bikes and made our pilgrimage to Wat Phu, finding the remains of the previous night’s partying alongside the remains of the temple, which, having just been in Angkor was fairly unimpressive; although it is a contemporary of the Angkor temples, it seems in a pretty bad state. However, there were no other Westerners in sight, and we became the subject of a photo shoot, first with some local girls who wanted their picture taken with me (a monk facilitated the conversation and acted as photographer), and then between Jason & the monk himself.

The grounds of Wat Phu Champasak

My photoshoot

Jason and the monk-photographer

After we rode our bikes back to our hotel & collected our bags, we set our sights on Don Daeng, an 8km-long island in the Mekong river comprised of 8 tiny villages, a 10-minute boat ride away from Champasak. We arrived there believing we could find a homestay for the next night or two – that is, we would be invited to stay in someone’s house. We were spotted and were brought to a woman who would host us for the night in her modest, 2-room house on stilts. We couldn’t communicate with her or her family at all, which made for some difficulty, but we were provided lunch and dinner (which were the same fare), and given a woven straw mat on which to hang out in the meantime. We thought we were expected to shower before dinner, so we did – using a scoop bucket out of a basin of fresh water in the detached ‘bathroom’. 

Homestay lodging - our bed is at the left; the host couple at right

Kitchen area

Jason just hanging out on our mat

The homestay was a fascinating introduction to village life in Laos, but frankly we (ok, I especially) felt really awkward about the whole thing, afraid of doing the wrong thing, upset about not communicating, and when we woke up in the morning we decided to hit the road and try to make it to our next main destination, Savannakhet.  We did this by the following route: 1) arrange boat back to Champasak; 2) hail sawng thaew back to Pakse; 3) wander a few kilometers up the main road of Pakse looking for the bus station; 4) hail passing bus (on advice of locals) by shouting ‘Savannakhet!?’; 5) kick back and relax for a couple hours on what turned out to be a very decent local bus experience – clean, comfortable, not stinky, relatively quick.  About 6 hours from the start, we arrived in Savannakhet, a characterful little town north of Pakse along the western border of Laos, so from here the views across the Mekong were of Thailand.  And having successfully navigated our way there, we proudly felt like we had become experts in the ways of Lao transportation.

We spent a very enjoyable day and a half in Savannakhet, doing little things like getting laundry done (less than $1 for about 3 lbs of laundry – I felt like I was robbing the woman!), seeing a couple temples, wandering out to the market, and drinking Beer Lao while watching local men play petang (think: boules) at a river-side shack of a bar.  It was hot & sticky so we were happy to have a couple days of moving slowly without much on the agenda.

Beer Lao is a good thing

Some intense petang, fueled by Beer Lao

We also discovered 2 culinary delights (aside from the ubiquitous bowls of noodle soup on offer). First, Lao-style barbeque, which we had both nights. We just pulled up a plastic stool alongside the locals and although we made a few mistakes (managed to put out our bucket of coals with a teapot of broth the first night), we enjoyed our delicious meal of table-prepared meat, seafood, eggs, noodles, and vegetables.  We also found a real treat: the Lao version of egg sandwiches.  Scrambled eggs in a crusty baguette were familiar enough – and ultimately the original draw to these roadside stalls – but topped with soy sauce, hot sauce, and garnished with cilantro and slices of cucumber, they are a surprisingly delicious eastern/western combo that we hope to recreate at home!

Just waiting for the lumps of fat to melt so we can get cookin'

No sal-peppa-ketcha here...

The most important thing we did in Savannakhet, though, was to arrange our first multi-day trek.  That experience needs space all its own, so that will have to wait for Laos Part II! Stay tuned.