Mar 15-16 Don Det to Pakse - We woke up early-ish, and got packed to leave Don Det. We'd actually had a really cool time here, although we'd managed to spend four days doing not much! The boatman wandered up to our guesthouse to get us, and then we set of for the mainland, where we were catching a bus to Pakse. The trip itself wasn't too long - maybe a couple of hours in a minivan. March to May are incredibly hot in this part of the world - it was pushing forty degrees by the time we left; luckily the aircon was working. We dropped a couple of people off on the way at Champasak - a city just near the Khmer temple of Wat Phu Champasak. We briefly considered stopping for a look, but we were still templed out from our earlier visit to Angkor, and just decided to press on.

Pakse's a dry and dusty mini-city, and is the only main urban center in the south of Laos. We stayed at a huge, sprawling place at the top of the hill - the Champasak Palace Hotel. Cheryl still wasn't feeling a hundred percent; revenge of the Indian restaurant from the night before, I guess! Anyway, we decided to take it easy and just flop down in the room, enjoy the air-conditioning, and attempt unsuccessfully to catch up on a few emails and a bit of blogging; this was one of the few places that had internet connections in the rooms themselves, but the connection in our room didn't work, and all other rooms were taken up for a wedding of some local bigwig.

I also decided to have a Lao Massage - this was something the hotel advertised. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but it was less of a massage, and more of an exercise in contortionism! You get your arms and legs twisted in to all sorts of yoga-like positions, and then the masseuse kind of jumps up and down on you - just to show there's no hard feelings, and that all your joints get a full workout. After I managed to stand up at the end of it, I hobbled upstairs, and lay down next to Cheryl on the bed. I'm not sure which one of up was feeling worse at that stage. I'm ashamed to say that we didn't even go out and look at Pakse - we just ordered some room service, flicked on CNN, and crashed for the night.

We were both feeling a bit recovered when we got up the next morning, although some of my joints were still making strange cricking noises as I moved around the room. We went out for breakfast; once again getting blasted by the heat although it was still early in the morning. There was a breeze of sorts blowing down the hot, grey streets, but is wasn't really cooling - it just felt like someone was following you quietly at a short distance, wafting a hairdryer at you! The drivers in Pakse have their own particular type of tuk-tuks - they're old Russian motorbikes, with weird little bonneted sidecars attached; they were real Heath Robinson affairs - and all looked like they'd been put together by people with a lot of love and enthusiasm, but limited engineering expertise. All the drivers without exceptions seemed to wear helmets, which was unusual in Laos - so maybe they were being cautious for a reason...

Anyway - on to the sights of Pakse. Oh, yeah - there aren't any. Actually that's not strictly true; there are a couple of markets, but they're pretty much the same as any other Asian town. We wandered up and down the main drag for a bit ... it was mostly shops selling all the important things that we'd seen here and in Cambodia; basically Honda motorcycles, karaoke machines, food and drink. Pakse has a sort of mini Chinatown area on the west side of town; this was something we've seen a lot of in Laos. Three or four blocks where the signs were in Mandarin, Chinese goods were on sale, and the decorations from Chinese New Year were still up.

First stop was the internet cafe, to upload a few of the blogs that I hadn't had time to post from Cambodia. We bumped into a French couple that we'd met on the bus from Ratanikiri, and chatted to them about their trip so far. They'd spent only a night in Don Det before coming up to Pakse, and had hired a motorbike to go up and around the Bolaven plateau - this was a trip that came highly recommended by the Lonely Planet, and it sounded like they'd had a great time, although they were looking forward to a few days break from sitting on a motorcycle. We had lunch the strangely named Delta coffee shop. This is a place that's owned by one of the nearby coffee plantations, and they make a big splash about selling things that they produce themselves. They have coffee (obviously!), jam, cheese and even some bottles of wine, although these looked slightly medicinal, so we gave them a skip!

During lunch, we chatted for a bit about the best trip to do, and then we decided to follow roughly the "Southern Swing" journey outlined in the Lonely Planet. This is a route that heads east out of Pakse, and takes in the villages of the Bolaven Plateau and Attapeu provice, basically looping through Sekong, Salavan, Attapeu town and Paksong. Cheryl was still not feeling entirely right, so she went back to the hotel to rest, and I set off to hire a motorbike. The Frenchies had told us that the best bet was to get our bike from the Lankham hotel. This place has fairly new, low mileage Japanese bikes, and we definately wanted something reliable after our Ratanakiri trip; I wasn't sure that we'd be up to easily changing a broken shock if the worst happened!. The Lankham hotel was pretty reasonable. It had 250cc dirtbikes for about 120,000K, and Honda Waves for 70,000K per day. I picked the one of the Hondas, with 2000km on the clock, and new-looking tyres, and headed back to the hotel.

The wedding from the night before was still going on at the Champasak hotel. They apparently last for at least two or three days in Laos, and so we headed out to a place called Champady's for dinner, and some peace and quiet. The food was good, but we really wanted to make an early start the next day, so we wandered back and hit the sack at about ten o'clock-ish, wondering (not for the first time!) about the Lao fascination with off-key karaoke!