Pakse, ປາກເຊ, the ghost town

Arrived to Pakse at six a.m. We got a ride from the bus station to our hotel Phi Dao, it was only a five minute drive. Pakse, with a population of 88,000 and a home to many ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese people, is a really small place and very quiet at this time of the day. We had to wait to get our room for an hour and a half, and spent it in the hotel restaurant. After resting in our hotel room for two hours we decided to see the city on foot.

Pakse was founded by the French as an administrative outpost in 1905. It was the capital of the Lao Kingdom of Champasak until 1946 when the Kingdom of Laos was formed. Even at ten a.m. it was a ghost town. There wasn't traffic and we saw only a few people outside. It was the hottest day on our travel so far, so that might've kept people inside for now. Soon we also found ourselves sitting in the shade having breakfast. We only found one nice looking restaurant, it was by the Mekong river. The river Xe Don also runs through the city. The restaurant didn't understand much english. We had french fries, soup and spring rolls, because they didn't seem to have much vegetarian food. Kari's tomato-sour cream soup upset his stomach, but my food was ok.

Our first breakfast in Pakse.

We walked some half an hour back to our hotel. Pakse was even more ascetic than Vientiane, so we didn't want to spend much time here. In the evening we had dinner at the hotel corner restaurant that served good Indian food, and didn't upset our stomachs.

The street pavements were in better condition than some in Finland.

 

Ghost town.

The next day we had a breakfast at a Chinese owned restaurant called Panda close to our hotel. He made us good müslifruit yoghurt, tea, toast and some souplike porridge. Then we rented bicycles and cycled to the Lao-Nippon Friendship bridge and over the Mekong river to the other side. While cycling over to the vendors to buy some drinks we found a long flight of stairs that led to Phu Salao, the Golden Buddha, looking over Pakse. We sat down for a while to drink and started talking to the Jersey couple who sat on the same table and seemed about our age. Time flew by really fast with the likeminded Steve and Jemma, and we must've sat there about two hours!

View to the other side of Mekong. The Golden Buddha is the yellow spot on the hill.

Lao-Nippon Friendship bridge.

Mekong river.

Pakse.

Golden Buddha.

The climb up to the Buddha was some 300 steps. We didn't mean to climb up there with Kari's broken leg, but were tempted by the views, so guess what, suddenly we were climbing! And it was a very hot day, even hotter than the day before, about 32 celcius degrees with the humidity levels somewhere in 80, which is normal for Pakse this time of the year. It was pretty rough to climb up in that heat, but Kari managed quite fine with his leg. We were up in no time and the view was about 270 degrees over the flat Pakse. We didn't go all the way up to the Buddha, where the view would've been 360 degrees. We've seen too many statues already, so we didn't want to bother for another one.

Cows at our resting area.

Stairs to the Buddha.

View from top of the stairs.

Other than the view there wasn't much to see, so we cycled back to the city and to a bridge that crosses the other river, Xe Don. An old man by the river was on a funny mood and decided to spray some river water on me with a garden hose and laughed to his great trick. Well, it was a hot day so it cooled down well, but I wondered how dirty the river water was. Mekong river at least is quite polluted. The water dried fast, so it didn't cool too long.

Wat Tham Fai on the back, also known as Wat Pha Baht.

Wat Tham Fai is the oldest Buddhist temple in Pakse.

Funerary monuments.

Pakse has a catholic church, although the population is predominately Buddhist.

Nothing but walls.

We had some laundry and a hotel near our hotel took care of them. Then we booked a bus to Ban Nakasang in Champasak province, the city near the island of Don Det, for the next morning.
In the afternoon we visited the Indian restaurant again. That evening we had a big thunderstorm, which gave us a great show in the skies with huge lightnings that lit up the little town.

Not the best picture, but the lightnings were huge and in a big area.

View from our hotel room in the evening.

Our mini bus left at eight a.m. for the near 2,5 hours trip. We stopped for some breaks. And what a coincidence, on the same bus with us was an American couple we'd been wanting to meet, Lance and Donna. We wanted to meet them as they seemed to be an interesting couple with an adventurous life. You can find them from the internet. They are musicians, who lost everything back at home, left to see and tour the world with their music and now have lived at Don Det for years. How strange that they happened to be on the same bus with us!