South Laos; Bolaven Plateau, Champasak and the 4000 Islands

We had a pretty horrendous bus journey down to southern Laos. A 10 hour sleeping bus ride became a 17 hour sitting up sticky hot ride. The air con/ cooling mechanism on our sleeping bus (which was pretty comfortable- you got a bed area for 2 people to share) wasn't working so it was very very hot and after 30 mins the bus stopped so that the driver could try and fix it. This was at 9.00pm. After a while it became apparant that we would be there for a while so every one got off the bus to chat and avoid the sticky hotness that was the inside of the bus. Around midnight the driver said '10 minutes' and we all got back on. The bus had cooled down for some of us to sleep and at 2.00am we were woken up to be told to get onto a new bus. Only this wasn't for sleeping. This was for sitting in a very small cramped uncomfortable space for the next 12 hours. The worst in all this was that our bus was ran by a company called 'King of the Bus''. I don't think so. We also met people who had photos of other 'king of the Bus' buses that were turned over on the side of the road after crashes. Nice. And just what you need to see when you are about to embark on a 10 hour journey on one of those said buses.

Needless to say when we got to Pakse Max and I were tired, sweaty, bickery and not pleasant company!! Luckily we decided to stay in a less 'budget' place for the night which had aircon and movies so we soon relaxed back into our chilled out travellerness and started to plan our trip to the Bolaven Plateau.
The Bolaven Plateau is a gorgeous area in the South East of Laos where they grow some of the most expensive coffee in the world. It also has some really amazing waterfalls so we decided to do some trekking and also a coffee tour. We stayed at a place called Tad Fane resort which was stunning and had a view of the Tad Fane waterfalls from our restaurant. If you look closely there is a red flag at the top of the left hand waterfall. This is the same flag that we are stood by on the next photos as we trekked up to the top of them.

We also visited the Champee Waterfalls (small Bananna Waterfalls) and we were the only people there which was blissful!

The next day we arrived in Paksong where we met Koffie a dutch coffee lover who moved to Laos after falling in love with his coffee growing wife and now serves up very nice very cheap expresso and teaches you how coffee is grown. he is such a coffee geek that on our second cup after we mentioned that it was more bitter than the first he tasted it, agreed and then threw that whole batch out before starting again!!

Next stop was Champasak which is a quiet town on the banks of the Mekong. It was so peaceful and pretty. We cycled 10km to the temple there- Wat Phu Champasak which is from the Angkor period and beautiful- even Max buzzed off it!!

The mekong has lots of islands within it. Next to Champasak is an island called Don Daeng which is very much 'real Laos'. There is only 1 resort on the whole island or you can stay at the community guest house (seeing as the only resort is 90 usd a night it is no wonder it was pretty empty!!) We visited for the day and walked around the top of the island, there were more water buffalo than people!! It was gorgeous!

After all of this we thought that it was time to head to Don Det which is part of the 4000 islands and have some 'down time'. There isnt much more to do there than sit in your hammmock and read and watch the world go by at its very sleepy pace. We loved it. We ventured out one day on bikes to check out the next door island Don Khon, which has cool waterfalls and we met some fun people to go drinking beerlaos with. Once we had torn ourselves offour hammocks we were ready for country no 4..... bring on Cambodia!!