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Articles Tagged ‘Pakse’

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Champasak: Give me a V (for visa)

Sunday, January 29th, 2006

The bus stopped, it was 5.30am and still pitch black outside.

“Is this Pakse?” I asked Bec, as though she should know. “Not sure. I’ll go outside and see what’s going on,” she replied drowsily, while I tried hard to keep my eyelids from falling. A few minutes later, she called out to me, now wide awake, “This is our stop, you have to get off!”

I stumbled off, grabbed my bag out of the pile of backpacks forming on the dirty ground next to the bus, and we headed for the nearest tuk-tuk. For we weren’t staying in Pakse, our plan was to head 40km further south to the little town of Champasak, where a millenia-old ruin, like a mini Angkor Wat, sat at the foot of the nearby hills.

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Pakse: Laos Karaoke Disco…….On Wheels

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

From Vientiane, Bec and I were headed to the very south of Laos, a journey that would take somewhere close to 10 or 11 hours. Our hope was to take a bus during the day; all throughout this trip we’d been trying to avoid night buses where possible, and given that we were skipping over the middle part of the country, to at least be able to see the landscape would have been nice.

But, unfortunately, the only bus going during the day was a local bus (read: rundown, crappy school bus type) that took 14 hours, as opposed to the reasonably comfortable VIP overnight bus, which would take 9 hours to reach the southern town of Pakse. We booked tickets for the overnight bus, scheduled to leave at 8.30pm, and were told we’d be picked up at 7pm from our guesthouse. That’s 7pm Laos time though, folks, which meant we were eventually picked up at 7.45pm by a giant tuk-tuk, basically the back of a truck converted into a tuk-tuk with two long bench seats running along each side. As we were driven to the bus terminal, we stopped to pick up more travellers, each of them saying they’d been waiting since 7 or 7.30pm.

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