posted by:

Nice Little Retreat at the Bolaven Plateau

Bolaven Plateau Travel Blog › entry 43 of 77 › view all entries

My Backpacking Journey through Southeast Asia at the end of 2006 and into 2007. The ups and downs of my trip and the many beautiful places I visited. Trully an Experience of a lifetime!

View All Photos

RSS Feed

Report spam

World › Asia › Laos › Bolaven Plateau

« Previous Entry: Witnessing a Trag… Next Entry: Angkor Heritage in Laos »

Nice Little Retreat at the Bolaven Plateau

December 14, 2006

Dinnertime

The following morning, Cedric, Maude and I made our way to the local bus station in order to hop on a local bus to Tat Lo at the Bolaven Plateau.

The bus that we took from Pakse to the Bolaven Plateau, was probably the oldest bus we've ever gotten onto. The floor boards, the seats, the windows were all rusting and the floor actually had holes everywhere. And per usual, along the way *bang*, the tyre popped! Typically as the locals explained, the tyre pops frequently as the majority of tyres used in Laos were from neighbouring VietSCAM. Surprising enough the spare was fitted in a jiffy, and we were on our way.

Upon arrival, we settled into a small village bungalow for a whopping $2 a night! shiza... why can't accomodation be $2 everywhere I go! (it was literally a straw thatched house).

Giving Alms early in the Morning

That evening I wandered around the neighboring villages to find that no matter how poor and how small the houses were, they all had huge satallite dishes LOL!

There was a little Lao boy crying, whilst his mates were mucking around and laughing. So I took a photo and showed it to him and funny enough he stopped crying in no time and even had a nice giggle.

That evening after dinner we stumbled upon a few village kids and one had an inappropriate yet extremely funny t-shirt on. On the front it had in BIG BOLD letters SEX and depicted within the word was every single position you could think of LOL....

Anyways that night as I settled in my extremely basic bungalow, I was welcomed by a delightful cockroach wandering around on my pillow.

Maude & Elika

.. arghhhh LOL... It was extremely COLD that night.

The following morning, I got up early and was kindly invited to sit by the fire in front of one of the neighbouring huts. Here I was fortunate to witness an authentic tradition in it's natural environment rather than having tons of clicks clicks of cameras going off in the background. A local girl was giving alms to monks who went on their daily walks around villages to collect alms. Monks are only allowed to feast before noon and then fast for the rest of the day till the following morning.

After breakfast we wandered for a few kilometres in search of the hilltribes but didn't really have much luck in finding the villagers who still wore their traditional outfits and what not. However the journey was still great as we stumbled across other locals and also the waterfall and the surrounding environment.

At about lunchtime we caught a local bus back to Pakse!