Day 8 - Thursday, May 7, 2009 - "I like coffee but I don't like tea"

I've uploaded all the pictures from this day to my Picasa account, I placed a few photos below but you can see the rest here or just try the slide show below.



--Up at 7:30 and ready for a day in Laos we were out of the room by 8 and grabbed some iced coffee and we were off on our tour.

First stop was a tea plantation where we say them baking green tea and we watched how they dried it over a fire for 40-50 minutes first, then ground it in a large hopper, then baked it in a tumbler oven for 3 hours or so. I bought a bag of their fresh tea for 35,000 kip (~4-5 USD).



Next was a waterfall and coffee plantation. Boun, our tour guide, explained the coffee is growing now and out of season. He also showed us Arabica and Robusta coffee beans growing and the bright yellow flowered "cattle" eggplant trees.

We walked down a short path and came into view of a 170 meter tall waterfall, this was a spectacular sight.

We loaded back into the Landrover and continued on to another waterfall. We hiked down into the misty abyss and took some pictures from the viewing platform before desending even farther down a slippery muddy path to the base of the falls. After about 30 minutes of exploring we trekked back to the top of the falls, we crossed over to a "swimming" area near the top. The water was pretty muddy so I just waded around and relaxed. After about an hour we headed back up to meet Boun for lunch.

Lunch consisted of steamed and sticky rice, papaya salad, and roasted venison meat and a really strong iced coffee.

After this we loaded up and went to the final water fall. The Paxoum waterfall was an amazing sight with a really great traditional village set up all around it. This area was created by a man that gathered all the unsustainable tribes in the area and created a non-profit tourist spot for them.

On the way back to Pakse we passed a massive rubber plantation and coffee exporting factory. Tonight at 7 we are supposed to play some peatung with Boun.

--Written May 8th--
We didn't end up playing p-tung last night, the court was closed because the owners mother was sick, so we went to another place to play some pool. Boun didn't make it out so we hung out with our travel agent Chan. We ate some more Laotian food, it was more or less the Gwielo version, mass produced and salty. Some of Chan's friends showed up and she took us to a "discotech" and the band was the same one we saw on the street the night before.

The place closed at 11:30 so we went back to the hotel.