Complete ambiance reigns here. We took a flight from Vientianne to Pakse in southern Laos. From the small airport, we headed down to the Mekong river and haggled to get on the river boat to Champasak, about an hour and a half down river. The boys were a bit staunch on the pricing at $4 USD each, so I asked the women already on board how much they paid… $.50. Hmm, well, we got the price down to $3 USD each. The area is a bit rigged for tourists, since there are not many of us in the area at the moment and transportation is fairly limited.
It was the right choice of travel, though. The breeze from the moving long boat kept it cool, the views were great and sitting on the bamboo mats leaning back against the edge against a pile of rice sacks was more comfortable than any bus trip could ever be. The lady that had informed us of the actual price of the boat came over and leaned against me while we had a point at the Laos word in the back of the Lonely Planet guidebook discussion that included topics such as where we were from, if we were married, whether we had kids or not, and how different our skin looked. A tan isn’t considered beautiful here, but my skin was a bit on the extreme pale side. Once she determined that I did not feel different in texture, she went back to her travel day of chatting with her friends, eating noodle soup, chewing beetlenut and eventually taking a nap. It was a full day for all of us.
Champasak was a great place, and extremely quiet. The guest house was on the river and the restaurant had a fantastic view of the fishermen. On this day, village life was progressing at the speed it always has progressed in this area.
The town was so quiet that we became concerned that we were not going to get a ride out to the Wat Phu ruins that we had come to see. We had the luck of morning with us the next day when a sangthaew filled with three Swedish guys stopped for us because they were halted by a mini-procession in the street consisting of a few gongs, yellow flowers, chanting and a girl seated high in a carriage on the back of a truck.
A French fellow that we had met the day before had ridden out on bicycle (a fine specimen of bicycle with a pretty white basket on the front) and we arrived at the gates with the Swedish crew at the same time as him. The difference between us was that he was soaked from top to toe. It was bloody hot out.
The ruins’ carvings were not much to swoon over, at least for a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but the placement of the ruins were stunning. They reached up the mountain with stairways lined with plumeria trees. Pilgrims still come out here (pilgrims in view being very normal western dressed Lao people) and offer incense and flowers to the Buddhas and lingams in the grass. The place is hard to describe because the sounds of the birds in the jungle, the hot weather mixed with a cool breeze on your face, the smell of plumeria and ripe mangos in the air and the sincerity of the people visiting the place, sort of put it over the top as a good place to preserve.
Our afternoon consisted of a busy day sitting on the restaurant porch with the exhausted French guy gazing out at a huge thunderstorm that blew up a good deal of waves on the river and made us reconsider the liklihood of being hit by lightning. We also learned that children of a certain age can be taught the ‘roll out the dough’ hand motions and then can be taught to combine that with a ‘hello’ wave which can eventually get you to a full salsa movement. Quite stylin’, MTV might be next.
