Date:
Start Point: Boring pakse
Destination: Tad Lo
Distance: 86km

We hit the road with a small, shared day pack containing our scant belongings for the next three days leaving us feeling sorry for our bags that were in the ever so dull Pakse. Heading out of town in the same direction as before we weaved through the traffic on our big, bad, basketed, bike. Enjoying the good roads we stopped at a `local` village at Phasoume. Here we found that this was in actual fact a tourist village - basically a resort where people of hill tribe descent live in a `show village` to share their culture with visitors, not a bad thing but also not what we had come to see so we just ate at the lovely on-site restaurant. It was a great dish of Thai style pork and lemongrass meatballs with sticky rice, before leaving again via a talking bird (great fun!).

Aiming for the village of Tad Lo (we did miss the turning the first time around and had to back track) we finally found the turn off. Feeling a little disappointed that our quest to see rural Laos had so far consisted of a tourist village we came up the not particularly scenic turn off feeling a little despondent. However, the road narrowed and narrowed and as it did so small bamboo houses began lining the road, little kids stood in doorways or stopped playing in groups to give us a wave, smile and `sabaidy`welcome. As we got further along, the river joined the road and we arrived into the village epicentre where we turned off the sealed road onto a dirt track and found a great little place renting out bamboo huts which we snapped up for a night.

That evening we walked to the nearby waterfall which had named the village (Tad or Tat means waterfall in Lao) and watched some orange clad monks clear a bank around a temple in the distance as a group of kids played and fished the river in the foreground. Some grilled beef for dinner left us collapsing into bed happy to be in such a beautiful place.