Mar 20 - Attapeu to Tat Fan - So we just about survived the night in Attapeu. At least there were no more rodent attacks to report, and all our fingers, toes and other bit still appeared to be attached the next morning. We'd toyed with the idea of trekking out a bit from Attapeu, as the far east of the country gets some good write-ups, but another hazy brown morning put us off the idea. We hopped on our bike, and headed back out of town, stopping for breakfast at a little roadside place, where we ordered fried rice and chicken (the only thing we could read on the menu). As our food arrived, a whole bunch of locals turned up and ordered bacon, eggs and omlets, which we looked at a bit wistfully. Anyway, the food was good. We had to retrace our steps past Sekong, before turning off route 16 at Ban Bengkhua Kam, and heading east on a dirt road towards Paksong.

This stretch of the road was beautiful. Apart from a couple of cleared areas, we drove through lush green jungle, with massive hardwood trees towering ovehead. The geography was also spectacular, with the road winding its way in between beautiful hill ridges, and across bridges over clear streams and small rivers. We saw some beautiful trees in spring colours, bursting redly from the emerald undergrowth, and orchids were just beginning to bud on plants that seemed to hang from every second tree in sight. We hardly saw anyone else on the way, just a couple of motorbikes coming the other way, and we spent an hour or so winding our way up onto the Bolaven plateau, as the air grew cooler, and things around us got greener. We passed a huge set of falls, Nam Tok Katamtok, which you can see from the road, tumbling away into the forest from a rivercourse that winds its way through pristine vegetation.

As we got closer to human habitation, at the top of the Bolaven plateau, the forest thinned out a bit. There were a couple of logging villages at the top, and one which seemed to specialise in charcoal-burning. Everything looked a bit different to the Mekong valley, though; I think the fertile soils up here lead to more permanent settlements, so many of the villages had lush green gardens, large fruit trees, and more permanent structures than some of the places that we'd already driven through. There were heaps of coffee plantations; that's one of the things that this area's famous for; but also fruit, tea and all sorts of other crops that prefer a cooler temperature. Unfortunately this time of year is really smokey, so we have didn't really have enough visibility to see the whole plateau. The morning's drive had definately been the most scenic so far, though.

As we cruised up towards Paksong, the road turned slowly from dirt to tar. There were a few potholes in the road, but a crew was out repairing them, and the run into Paksong was pretty smooth. As we drove through the town, it was sad to see truck after truck with Vietnamese plates, piled high with huge tree-trunks. The South of Laos is being stripped of hardwoods at a totally uncontrolled rate, and there doesn't seem to be any will to address this problem before it's too late.

We headed back on the road towards Pakse, and pulled in at Tat Yuang waterfall. These are pretty cool falls, with a bamboo staircase winding down to a viewing platform opposite the main drop. The place caters mainly to Thai tourists who day-trip here from Thailand, and its grounds have been lawned and manicured, with picnic tables around the streams above the head of the falls. It was certainly a lot tamer than some of the huge, wild falls we'd seen on our trip, but was very pretty, and we just relaxed here for an hour or so before getting back on the road.

Our last overnight stop, before heading back to Pakse, was at Tad Fane Lodge, which (with the transliteration again!) is a set of lodges built just above the Tat Fan falls. The bungalows were really good; laid out lush green gardens, and looking out onto the gorge below the falls. Tat Fan is huge; the river basically drops a couple of hundred metres down the edge of what looks like a big cylindrical hole in the earth. This opens out on the eastern side to a river gorge which flows away through the Dong Hua Sao National Park. It's quite spectacular, even in the dry season, and we had lunch on the restaurant's balcony, overlooking the falls, which roared away in the background. There were a few other people there; they'd mainly biked out from Pakse for the day, as it's less than an hour away. There were a couple of people we'd sort of seen around Pakse, and three German guys with big Freddie-Mercury moustaches and leather pants who were sharing a room. I thought they might be motorbikers, but Cheryl was betting that they just liked leather pants, and each other!

After lunch, which was cheap, but excellent, we walked down a dirt path cut into the cliff to get a better view of the falls. We came to an outcropping with the most amazing view - looking down into the bottom of this huge chunk of empty air that time and the elements had gouged out, with the waterfall pummelling the remaining outcrops in its path, scattering rainbows all across the gorge. We sat there for a good half hour, just watching the water flow, and looking out over the jungle in the distance. It's one of those vistas that you'd see in an Attenborough film, and as you look down the gorge, all you can see in the distance is a set of green hilltops, with their tree-line silhouettes fading away to grey in the distance. There's a huge amount of noisy bird and insect life here, and as we were watching the falls, this enormous beetle, with pom-poms on its antennae scuttled out into the path. It was irridescent blue and red; and like everything here it seemed to be bigger and more brightly colored than you'd expect.

We toyed with the idea of climbing down to the bottom of the cliff, but we quickly realised that we'd have to climb back up again, so we had another undeserved siesta, and headed back to the restaurant for drinks and dinner. The board above the bar proclaimed all sorts of cocktails. I think they encourage visitors to add their own personal favourites to the list. I decided to spare them any of my tequila mixes, and we settled for our first gin and tonics of the trip, which were great. We had some delicious chicken curry, and just chatted away into the night, with the falls rumbling in the distance. On reflection, this had been a pretty cool trip, and the first time that we'd been travelling under our own steam for quite some time, which was a nice change!

We headed to bed, and got to sleep, although this was another place fitted with the bizzare hard matresses you get in Laos. They look like real matresses (we even took the sheets off the check) but they're clearly just a bit of padding around a hard wooden frame. Anyway - they're supposed to be good for your back, and we managed to get our nine hours in the end ...