Scheißekopf

With the extra days that we had due to leaving the four thousand islands early we all headed back up to Pakse (Clive, Doro, Mathias and moi) and organised a trip to go and see the Bolaven plateau.

Our guidebook also urged us to stay in Pakse for a few days and we might grow to love it. Hmmm perhaps someone on the Lonely Planet Asia desk is sleeping with the Mayor of Pakse as apart from the amazing $4 massage, we saw nothing to endear the city to us. We did have good Indian food there bizarrely but it really highlighted how you have to accept a different standard of cleanliness in your restaurants and food preparation areas over here. Even the fancy restaurants have people sitting in alleyways chopping veggies and it’s not uncommon to have cobwebs or grungy looking tile/wall in the eating area. They also seem to put the toilet almost in the kitchen in a lot of places which I’m pretty sure contravenes a whole slew of health and safety rules. If you can look past these minor things though the food really is fabulous 🙂

But back to the Bolaven plateau. This area is the principal region where Lao coffee is grown and has been grown since the 19th century when the French were looking to maximize the yield of their colony. We got on a day tour with the Sabaidee2 guesthouse which was just over $20/person and would drop us off at one of their stops and then pick us up with the next tour group the next day – awesome!

We started off with a visit to a coffee/tea plantation where I learned that all tea (well black, white and green) actually comes from the same plant and it just depends on the leaf and how it’s processed. Well I never 🙂 We also saw the various stages that coffee goes through from the red berries on the trees, to extraction of the seed then washing and drying before finally being roasted. Oh and we caught site of a couple more giant creepycrawlies, one of which our guide chose, I said CHOSE, to take off it’s web and put on himself, who does that??? The picture below is not for the fainthearted. I’m getting the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

After the plantation and some delicious local green tea it was time for our first waterfall stop. Now we’d been rather disappointed by the waterfalls down in the 4000 islands but not so here. All three that we saw were gorgeous and quite different from each other, preventing the waterfall fatigue from setting in. The surrounding countryside was also far more lush and the verdant greens were a perfect backdrop for the cascades of water.

The other feature of the tour was stopping in to see some local villages. I have to say that I don’t enjoy this kind of thing as it feels a little like going to the zoo. I would be totally up for going to visit if we were going to do something like teach English or get involved in the community somehow, but just going to look at people as they go about their daily lives is quite uncomfortable. The first place we stopped was practically deserted and we just had a look at their spirit house which is where they make sacrifices if someone is ill or in more happy circumstances like a wedding for example. Buffalo are the animals of choice but will cost the village about 4,000,000 Kip (about $500) so it’s a massive deal for the community.

The second village was much bigger and housed about 1000 people. Apparently it’s not uncommon for a couple to have 12 or so kids because of course birth control isn’t exactly readily available and I’m guessing they’re not super keen on abstinence as an alternative. There were (obviously) loads of kids around who loved posing for photographs and then checking out the results and Clive had quite the gaggle of the around him as he was showing them his iPhone, which I failed to get a photograph of I’m afraid. Our guide said that mobile phones are actually really very common even in these rural villages and he would expect them to have Internet in the not too distant future as well. We had noticed as we travelled through Laos that even though people are living in bamboo huts and using wells to get water, or showering in the rain water runoff at the side of the road, they have enormous satellite dishes outside and TV inside, so I guess the Internet is the next logical step?

Our final stop for the day was Tat Lo where we’d decided to spend the night. After dropping our bags we rendezvous’d in the bar with ze Germans and introduced them to that king of all card games, shithead. Excuse my French. We soon had them addicted and exclaiming “Oh dear it’s getting a bit whiffy over there” like old pros. We even used the game as a language learning opportunity, though how useful the word Scheißekopf is going to be to us when we go to Germany I’m not sure 😉

Quick note – if you look closely in one of the waterfall pics you’ll see Clive sitting on a rock right in the middle at the bottom of the falls after he’d seen a local doing just that – never to be outdone!