For the Christmas break we wanted to go somewhere cold. A friend had recommended the Bolaven Plateau in Southern Laos. This is one of the quieter areas of Laos, and due to the elevation of the Plateau it meant that we were likely to get some woolly hat weather.
We took the overnight sleeper train to Ubon Ratchathani. As a Christmas treat we booked first class so we had a bunk bed cabin to ourselves. This is definitely the way to travel on the trains in Thailand. You can control the temperature so they don't freeze you with aircon, and you have lights you can turn off it's possible to get some sleep. Apart from the shunting which can send you across the bed, you generally wake up feeling like you've had a proper night's sleep.
Once we got to the border and dealt with the scheming border officials who find miraculous extra charges for it being the last Tuesday in the month or something equally stupid, you enter Laos and jump in a minivan to the town of Pakse. Pakse is a small dusty concrete town with a number of overpriced guesthouses, but we needed to go there for a few supplies and to rent a motorbike to take us the 40 kilometres up onto the Plateau. We were lucky enough to get a bike without a footwell, so this meant we had to tie our 3 bags onto ourselves or balance them precariously on the bike. After the first kilometre it started to get uncomfortable. After 10 it was hell. Then it started to rain. Then as we crawled our way up the hill for fear of unseating the bags, it got cold. Instead of stopping and digging out woolly hats and jumpers, we just carried on in grim determination, getting stuck behind the slow tractor like contraptions that were piled high with sensibly dressed warm smiling locals. As you can imagine, we were very glad to reach the hotel.
Tad Fane resort overlooks the tallest waterfall in Laos. The Tad Fane waterfall is a twin stream waterfall that plunges 200 metres down into a deep gorge. The resort was opened as a
way of offering locals an alternative and more sustainable income than logging and hunting. The area is becoming increasingly popular with tourists, and many people can now work in guest houses, as guides, or making traditional handicrafts. This is giving the forests and the animals chance to recover.
There are about 10 waterfalls in the area, and also some really unusual land formations on the plateau. We did a number of guided and unguided walks while we were there. On the first walk we did, our guide took his role as 'coffee plant educator' very seriously (we were still being quizzed on the croprotation and prices per kilo of the different coffees three days later). We then visited a coffee making house and were shown the process of turning beans into coffee. While there we were offered refreshments of tea or coffee. Nick decided to join the locals with a few shots of Laos whiskey, standard breakfast apparently.
For one of our unguided walks we went round the gorge to the top of Tad Fane waterfall. This was the shortest walk we did, but by far the hardest. Sliding down slippery mud tracks while clinging to slimy tree branches of questionable strength, all the while knowing that when you slip and lose your footing you're heading straight for a 200 metre drop, is a bit exhausting. Still, it's a lot easier than climbing back up! We had been told that if you cross the first head of the waterfall, thatit is possible to continue through the forest some way to the other head where you get a better view. We crossed the water by jumping boulders and then got completely bogged down in undergrowth on the other side. Thinking that it's best not to wander aimlessly around in the bushes when near the edge of a gorge, we turned around and headed back. Predictably, when crossing the water to get back, I fell in. It sounds quite dramatic falling in 10 metres up stream from a 200 hundred metre drop, but when the water is only about waste high, you're never in any great danger of getting swept over.
New Year at Tad Fane was quite quiet. Most people only stayed at the resort for a day or two, so we hadn't had chance to make many friends. The open sided resort restaurant was the only place to eat in the area, and they made it nice with a small open fire in the corner. We ended up sitting with the locals while they sang Laos songs around the fire. As New Year approached we bought them all a big bottle of Beer Laos each and they gave us some of their Laos Laos (paint stripper like hallucinogen inducing local alcohol...sip don't glug!) The staff started drinking really quickly, and more and more beers were produced. At the end of the night when we went to pay, we were charged not for 5 staff beers, but about 12. Sadly we entered the new year trying to explain to people that if you ask you'll probably get, if you try and cheat or con, it'll end up costing you. It was a bit of a bad end to the night and left us feeling a little bit disappointed with the new 'friends' we had made.
New Years day we blew out our hangovers with a walk up onto the plateau. We were taken there a few days before on a guided walk and had wanted to go back to get more pictures. It's a crater pocked volcanic area with odd rock formations all over it. The locals go up there with their cattle or to burn down (yes, 'burn down'... a questionable way of getting trees to fall down as they are not allowed to cut them down) and steal the teak trees. One of the things you can see up there is the damage done by the American bombs that got dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. The plateau is one of the places the American planes dropped the bombs so they had fuel to make it back to their base.
The only other unusual experience we had while in Laos, was the drive in a taxi back to the border. 70% of the hour and a half journey was spent on the left hand side of the road. This is somewhat scary when they actually drive on the right hand side of the road in Laos. All drivers there seem to have a rather fatalist approach to driving. It made Thai drivers look sensible, something I never thought possible.
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