Arrival in Laos

There was an evening in November when Corrie, showing enthusiasm for a tiny eco-tourist company she'd just read about, set in motion the events that took us to Pakse. Pakse is an old colonial town on a peninsula of the Mekong and a major tributary.

Sometimes its spelled Pakze. From there we were heading to Paksong (but if you're keeping score, this one specific iteration is actually Paxsong), where we start the trek.

This eco-tourist company has, as one of their activities, a tree-top and zip-line adventure set up outside of Paksong. It was never clear that the Lao trip would ever work out until we were able to order airplane tickets while in Phnom Penh.

One of the benefits of not having plans set up is that you can make decisions on the fly. It may lead to some walking around with your gear trying to find a place to sleep, but that's just part of the stress of enjoyment.

We landed in Pakse, I traded one of the brand new blue hundred-dollar bills (that the immigration folks wouldn't take) for 800,000 Kip, and we got a cab to an area with many hotels. The town has some old French-colonial touches:

And that colonialism mixed with the normal density in Southeast Asian vistas to create interesting looking hybrids:

We located the hotel we told the cabbie we wanted to go to: they had a room, but we were looking for something a little less expensive (not like it was that pricey). We went around the corner and ended up with the cheapest room in their place, a converted closet and washroom, for a whopping K80,000. It was only ten bucks.

We went for a walk before looking for a place to eat. It turned out out hotel was on the same block as the eco-tourism establishment where we'd be mustering the next morning.

During our walk we found a bridge over the tributary, and in the picture below the Mekong is visible off in the distance:

The next day we went off to the jungle, and after we spent one night in the jungle we returned to Pakse and got a room that was easily the largest hotel room I might have ever paid for in my life. But that was a cosmic justice move, since that first night ten-dollar room was the smallest hotel room I've ever bee associated with:

It was another example of feeling like a giant.

Incidentally, being a blue-eyed blond-haired giant isn't as rare here as it was in Honduras or Guatemala. Chairs and too small, tables and sinks too low, the "large" bus recliners see me spill over them in all directions.

Even the paperwork has us being outsized. I found this scenario while filling out the entrance forms for Lao and realized it was a perfect metaphor--I'm a giant in all apparent regards:

Even a picture of me is too big...