Another long bus journey today, but one to remember! We got up and checked out early then got a tuk tuk to the bus station and bought tickets for the 8:30am air-conditioned bus to Pakse, seven hours south of Tha Khaek. It cost an extra 10,000 kip for the air-con option…shame it didn't turn out to be true! It was quite a hot journey but luckily we were near a window that opened! Anyway, onto the interesting part…

When we boarded the bus there were only a few other people on so we headed straight to the back seat for some extra room. Dave sat in the middle seat, me next to him, leaving a spare seat next to the window. We hoped the bus wouldn't get full so we'd have plenty of room for the seven-hour journey…for the first ten minutes it was perfect, until we stopped to pick some more people up. Next thing we knew, there were two men carrying a full size fridge freezer down the aisle towards us! They didn't give us time to move so we were trapped in the corner while they wedged it into the other half of the back seat. That might have been OK, but then they started wheeling a moped up the aisle! Again, we weren't told or given enough time to move but one of them gestured towards some free seats near the front. As they were securing the moped by tying the wheels to the bus seats with rope, we planned to climb over the seats to get further forward. However, as soon as they'd finished tying it, the bus started to move with Dave balancing on the chair arms trying to climb over it! We soon decided to stay put and climb over when we needed to get off! The good thing was that no-one could get to the seats we were in due to our new cargo so we ended up with a seat each and plenty of room to stretch out! When the fridge and moped were brought on, we saw them put a double mattress on the roof. A little later on, that too was brought on board to join the party in the aisle. A very random journey, but all part of the travelling entertainment! I only had to climb over once at a toilet stop and we both had to climb over again to get off, but this time when the bus had stopped!

As we got off the bus, a tuk tuk driver offered us a lift into the town (7km away) but we knew that he was charging too much so we said no. We soon found that he was pretty much our only option as there weren't any others around. After waiting by the main road for a while and then walking down the road in the direction of town, we were saved by a man in a motorbike with a sort of sidecar - a new mode of transport for us! We eventually made it into the centre of Pakse, but unfortunately not to the hotel we wanted to go to (our driver only seemed to know the most expensive place so we let him take us there as we were desperate to get into the centre!) We consulted the map and ten minutes later we arrived at our chosen hotel and checked into a lovely £10 per night room! After a much-needed shower and half an hour online we headed up the road to a coffee shop/restaurant called Delta Coffee. They have a coffee plantation nearby on the Bolaven Plateau and the LP had some very good things to say about it. We had some lovely food, Beerlao and coffee while looking in the guidebook for things to do whilst in Pakse. We're planning to stay here for a few days as we've done a lot of travelling on strange buses lately!