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And after 10 weeks with our bums on the Honda Bonus, we finally said good bye to it as soon as we arrived in Pakse, Southern Laos. It took us 1,5 day and some degree of hard selling, to convince a couple of Germans (Germans are the craziest lot of all) to buy our motorbike. We were soooo sad to see it go but also rewarded to have done more than 5000 Kms with it, and happy to hand it over to the Germans that looked as excited as we were when we bought it in Saigon.
And because we felt lost without our bike, we rented right away a scooter, left our luggage behind in Pakse and left for a 6 days tour of the Boulevan Plateau and 4000 islands. The Boulevan Plateau is famous for its cool temperatures that can be 10/15 degrees lower than Pakse, where the 40 degrees are reached easily. This area in inhabited by minority ethnic groups that although do not longer wear traditional clothing, as in the North, they still preserve their animist traditions and rituals such as the buffalo sacrifice to the spirits of the forest. We were lucky enough to participate one of this sacrifice, which seem to be a big fat excuse for the whole village to get drunk, but not lucky to witness the actual buffalo kill. The b*****s at the village, although we got up early and showed up at 08:00 when the sacrifice was scheduled for, came up with a lie and let all the tourists walk away for a village visit and killed the beast while we wandered off. We later found out that albeit the whole village gets drunk and party, they also truly still believe in the sacrifice and did not want us to witness their sacred killing rituals. At the beginning we were quite pissed off but then understood it and bugged off. Instead we witnessed the killing of a small cow which was not exactly the same as the buffalo but, hey, better than nothing.
After the huge disappointment, we headed towards Paksong the coffee capital of the Plateau and reachable after a pleasant ride along coffee plantations and minority villages. Besides the ride, there's nothing to do in Paksong but taste some freshly roasted local Arabica. We did the tasting at a Dutch guy café in town and had a quite a laugh with this straight humor dude that was trying to teach Dutch to his 3 years old Laotian looking kid. After the tasting we visited a couple of amazing waterfalls that are abundant in the area and then headed off to Champasak.
Champasak is a cute little village and home to a magnificent temple from before the Anghor time in Cambodia. The archeological site is not as busy and Anghor Wat and still keeps the mystical feeling it intended to have when it was built. We enjoyed the visit a lot and the night before we even managed to eat gnocchi in an abandoned Italian restaurant in town (the Italian owner left Laos but the restaurant is still being run by his Laotian girlfriends ;)
The next stop was 4000 islands at the very Southern bottom of Laos bordering Cambodia. The area is literally made of small and big islands surrounded by the mighty Mekong than make the place a top tourist destination for people that want to chill out and fancy a swim. We did indeed manage to have a dip, but always careful not to be dragged away by the Mekong's currents, and we loved it big time as it was since Cambodia few months ago that we didn't wear our swimming outfits.
The cherry on the cake of the 4000 islands visit was the dolphins. There are still few hundreds inwards dolphins, a breed on the edge of extension, still swimming in the Mekong across Laos and Cambodian waters. The rumor was that seeing the dolphins was very difficult, but we actually did manage to spot a few which made us super happy. I mean, we sound like kids, but experience wild dolphins although from the distance is quite cool in terms of sight, sounds etc etc.
After 4000 islands, we headed back to Pakse where we dropped off our scooter spent the last Kip (Laos money) and jumped on the morning bus to Ubon in Thailand, where we boarded the afternoon train to Bangkok and reached the capital to plan our next adventure, Burma (Myanmar).
We will most likely be offline for one month as Burma is disconnected in terms phone and internet. We might be lucky enough to log in in bigger cities by we doubt it. Otherwise you will hear from us on a month or so. Wish us luck for Burma, as the country is very challenging!
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