The Motorcycle Diaries (On and Around the Bolaven Plateau)
Monday, February 4th, 2008After having so much fun (despite the dust and knee injury) renting a motorbike in Ban Lung, Andreas and I decided to rent motorbikes again and do a tour of Southern Laos. We rented bikes from our hotel in Pakse for 70,000 kip/day. Our bikes were two nearly brand new 110 CC Honda’s. My bike had only 500 km on it. Waking up early on Wednesday morning, we set out for our first stop of Tad Lo. Leaving early meant that the traffic was light. We stopped at a hardware store before leaving Pakse and bought some chains to lock the bikes with at night. It was about 85 km to Tad Lo which we covered in a few hours. At first, I was a bit uneasy on the bike, but was soon comfortable enough to cruise along at 60-80 km/hr. We stopped for a rest in a small village where Andreas had coffee (Laos produces its own coffee beans at plantations on the plateau). I bought some bread made by a local lady that tasted as if it contained some sort of blueberry. We could see the high cliffs of the plateau rising in front of us. After the break, we began the climb up the plateau reaching an elevation of 900 feet by the time we were in Tad Lo. I immediately liked Tad Lo as soon as I saw it. Accomodations consisted of thatch bungalows set along a dirt road. The more expensive ones faced the waterfall for which Tad Lo is known. There were very few tourists around. After checking in, we set out to look around the waterfalls and the area. There were a series of waterfalls so we had to walk upstream to view them all. There were children swimming and fishing all along the falls. After viewing the falls we began to look for a place to cross the stream to take a shortcut back to our bungalows. While doing this, the branch that I was holding onto keep my balance on a rock broke, and I went falling into the water. Everything on me got wet (money, camera, hiking boots, etc.). Fortunately the camera case had enough padding to absorb most of the water keeping my camera mostly dry. Since I was now wet anyway, I just walked across the stream to the other side. During the walk back to the bungalow, we ran into an elephant (two actually). They were just standing around contentedly munching on bananas. They had saddles on the their backs, so I assumed that people rode them, but there were no handlers in sight. After bidding farewell to the elephants, I went back to the bungalow, changed, and spread all my things in the sun to dry. In the evening we took the motorbikes to a waterfall about 10 km distant. We passed through a village with a group of men playing a Laotian game much like volleyball. The main difference is that one can only use their head and feet to get the ball over the net. Because it is the dry season, there wasn’t much water. The view more than made up for it though. The waterfull plunged over a 100 meters down a cliff. From the cliff, we had an excellent view over the whole valley below. In the evening, I was shown a bomblet casing from a cluster bomb. Laos was heavily bombed during the Vietnam War with American cluster bombs. From inside the main bomb casing, individual bomblets are sprayed over a wide area. The bomblets are metal spheres with fins. They detonate after so many revolutions. If they aren’t dropped from a high enough altitude they fall to the ground without exploding. Children find undetonated bomblets and think they are balls to play with. As they throw them around, many of them explode after the required number of revolutions are complete. Two years ago a group of children were killed in Tad Lo. [read on]
cjun