My birthday in the South of Laos

Yes, today is my birthday !! And I made to the destination (Pakse) in time in order to participate to the tour I had booked to the Bolaven Plateau. I finally had this bus with a bed, bt it was so incredibly narrow that I could hardly sleep. On a relatively limited space, there was me, 3 Lao people and a French guy living here in Laos. 3 English guys in front of us making lots of noise. Well, the most important thing is that I am here !!

The tour was great and we were only three: me and a very nice older BELGIAN (!!) couple. We visited a coffee / tea plantation, the highest waterfall in Laos (with 120 metres also one of the highest in Asia - it seems..) - really beautiful ! - and four other extremely nice and idyllic waterfalls. We also went to a local market and visited villages of some of the very many ethnic minorities living in Laos, a lot of them are not buddhist. One community here has the tradition to prepare the cuffins well in advamce for the older people or if somebody falls ill. Until they are needed they are put underneath the rice-storage houses (see picture below). While the traditional cuffins were made out of wood, "progress" has reached Lao ethnic minorities as well and they buikd them now with concrete !!

Markets here are always a nice experience and that's why I decided to put one picture section just with picture from different markets, I think I took hundreds of them!!)

Tomorrow I will start my tour further down South, where there is very likely no Internet access as there is mostly not even electricity. For two days, I will be kayaking on the Mekong and I am supposed to see the unique Irawaddy dolphins.

Yesterday, still in Vientiane, I visited - amongst others - the oldest buddhist monastery of Vientiane, which was actually turned into a museum. It is the only one which survived the multiple Siamese destrcutions of Vientiane's temples. It seems that this was because it was built in the Siamese style and the soldiers did not dare to destroy a temple looking like the ones they knew from home. The Wat is extremely nice. I found particularly impressive the thousands of Buddha-statues in little niches in a kind of cloister around the Wat. I had a nice lunch in the Mekong Riverside Restaurant, from the terrace of which you can hardly see any water as large parts of the river are dried out during the dry season.