Thursday, March 20, 2014
The road to Pakse was good. Well, apart from cows regularly and aimlessly crossing the road. We suspect this will be a common occurrence here in Southern Laos.
Pakse has good coffee and it was not long before we found some, along with lunch. Pakse also has a supermarket of sorts. Lots and lots of aisles of tinned and long shelf life goods, and not a single fridge, freezer or fresh fruit, meat or fish stand. But since we haven’t seen a supermarket for while, it was quite exciting.
We checked into our hotel (Pakse Hotel) to escape the heat. We did get out for a little walk around town and managed to pick up a Laos flag for Sterlin. Dinner was in the roof top bar where we watched the sun set.
Friday, March 21, 2014
We decided to stay another night in this fine town. Today we had some chores to complete and a UNESCO World Heritage Site to visit.
It is not clear if car insurance is compulsory in Laos or not. But we figured, probably best to get some. There was no one selling car insurance at the Cambodian border, so we looked into getting us some here in Pakse. The Tourist Information Office pointed us in the right direction. We found a little office happy to sell us insurance for a very reasonable USD $27 for one month.
After that little exercice we turned around to head towards the temple ruins of Vat Phu. We had got about 400 meters away from the insurance office heading down the road, albeit on the wrong side of the road due to some major road construction. After the construction we failed to correctly move back to the correct side. Then we made things worse by illegally turning left at the lights even thou we didn’t actually have green signal. Surprise surprise, we were pulled over by the police. In broken English it was made clear to us that we were on the wrong side of the road and this was a major problem. The Police weren’t buying my story that the correct side of the road was under major construction and as a result caused us to be in the wrong place. But to be fair, I had just broken two road rules. After a short discussion I was advised that the problem would go away for a mere 50,000 kip (USD $6). Ok, I paid the bribe. I said I never would, but pragmatics took over in my confused state. Grrrrrrrrrrrr. (*)(*) I (Caroline) would like to reiterate that we were actually on the wrong side of the road, so ‘bribe’ might be a bit strong…we could’ve ended up with a much heftier fine.
Vat Phu Champasak is 40 kms south of Pakse and is the most significant Khmer style temple in Laos. The road there was very good. So good that there was a toll. However, we drove at a modest speed to avoid more police fines and aimlessly wandering cows. Here’s the Wikipedia link to Vat Phu.
The temple was very nice. The site dates back to the 5th century AD, but now all the buildings and temples are from around the Angkor Wat period. So the site was very familiar for us and we had a nice visit. This was probably our last Khmer style temple for this trip.
Back at the hotel we were entertained with rain and an electrical storm. Which also meant no live and loud music from the roof top bar, so a quiet night.
