20. Nov 17th On to Cambodia

 It was an early morning market day.  I rise early to meet with Pheng and our driver and we head to the market for 6:00 am.  Everything seems to be within walking distance in Champasak, so the drive to the market is about 2 minutes.  Although the market is busy it’s small in size and I am finished looking in about 30 minutes.  But that’s after I go through each stall looking for items I would never find in Canada and this place was a gold mine full of them.  

First up were the flowers from Banana plants.  

Next up were tiny frogs.  They’re still alive and tied at the hips to each other.  Maybe frogs are a French influence brought into this area or did the French start consuming because they colonized this area?  I think it’s the later.

Crickets.  Yup, Pheng got me to try one.

Rats, Frogs and Fish.  The rats were definitely in the “I’m not sure I want to be close to them” category even though they were no longer moving.  

On the upside there were some interesting looking mushrooms and some pastries.  One vendor has a wide variety of pastries so I bought a bunch of them for 1000 kip each (about 7 cents each).  I sampled a couple had Judith try the donut one (sweet dough and sugar crust) and gave the rest to Pheng.  

We’re back at the hotel after the morning market by 6:45 am so I can have breakfast with Judith.  It’s an OK breakfast spread, but I need to share it with a bus load of European tourists.  France I think.  To my surprise, one of them butts in front of me at the espresso machine; I’m so surprised, I blurt out something (honest I didn’t swear).  She turns to look and sees that I’m standing there.  Most would have apologized and gone to the back of the line but she stood her ground, said sorry and made a motion that I understood to be “OK if I proceed?”  It would be senseless to start a battle; I just let her in and am thankful I’m not on her 35 seat tour bus.

Our bags are all packed up and put into the van.  We leave Done Khong Island crossing onto the mainland and heading south towards Cambodia.   On our way we will stop at Khone Phapheng Falls which is considered on of the largest and powerful waterfalls in Southeast Asia.  It’s about a 40 minute drive.  When we get there, it continues to be obvious that there are fewer tourists around than there would normally be.  Pre-covid numbers have yet to return.  The parking lot has only a few other vehicles.  It’s great for me but I feel for all those that depend on tourism.  

It’s over 10,000 metres from one edge of the falls to the other so its the widest in the world.  It’s the main reason why the Mekong isn’t fully navigable from the South China Sea to China.  But now there is a dam upstream from the falls and the amount of water flowing over the falls has been reduced.  Our guide Pheng says that before the dam, you couldn’t see many of the rocks that are visible today.  The rocks in the foreground used to be fully underwater but now you can walk all over them.

As we tour the wooden walkway along the falls we come across a swing.  Neither one of us can resist.  The seat isn’t level so the swing is a bit awkward to use.

On our way out of the parking lot for the falls, we see one of the drivers resting in the luggage hold of the bus.  I’ve seen drivers using hammocks in tuktuks as they wait for their next ride but this was definitely an interesting solution.

Novel solution for a quick nap.  

We arrive at the boarder to Cambodia at about 9:45.  There is a $2US fee that I need to pay to exit from Laos.  At the checkpoint building my passport is stamped after my fee is collected.  

The Laos border checkpoint.  

From the there, we walk towards Cambodia.  Our driver drives up the road to a large gate, allowing us to collect our luggage and walk through a no-man’s area to the Cambodia side.  Pheng helps us walk this path with our luggage.  On the Cambodia side, which has a similar gate, we meet our our new guide,  Dalign, and he and Pheng chat a bit to introduce each other.  It appears they first met many years ago, but this is the first time they have exchanged a few words.  Pheng now returns back to Laos and we walk on towards the immigration building on the Cambodia side.  

We enter the Cambodia side and there is one person who is directing people through the paperwork trail.  He doesn’t really look like an official since those people are uniformed and behind wickets.  We are directed to fill out two copies of the immigration form.  He asks for payment of around $45 and I pass over 3x$20.  He takes the money down the hallway while I continue with filling out the form.  A uniformed officer brings me back the change, but the administrator takes it away from me.  He asks if we have a guide which we do.  (I believe we have to pay more if we have one) and he hand me back some change from my $60.  It’s not fully explained how much and what I’m paying for and neither is there any receipt…  

I’m on my second form having filled in details such as name and passport number when the administrator picks up my passport and the two forms and starts to walk away with them.  I tell him that I haven’t finished and he replies, that the other sections aren’t important.  I gather up my bags and start to follow him.  I can see that he’s dropped off my paperwork at wicket number 3, but when I get there, there is no one behind that wicket.  By this time Judith has finished her forms and follows me to the wickets.  I turn back from watching her come over and out pops a hand from another wicket holding a dark blue passport with one copy of the form.  I am relieved to see it was mine.  

Next we take our passports and luggage down to the other end of the long hall.  Our luggage is scanned and we’re directed to write the visa number now on our passport onto the immigration form.  There’s a new wicket to sit at for processing.  Finger prints of all 10 digits are electronically scanned.  I then proceed to the next wicket for picture taking. And then we’re done and heading out the door.  It took about 10 minutes.  Our guide Dalign said it took 45 minutes that last time he was at this border crossing so I feel a bit lucky.

We walk over to the parking lot with our luggage and meet our driver Souk Tong.  Then we load into the van and head to Krong Stung Treng, a city on the Mekong.  We cross over a large bridge and head south.  

We decide to have some lunch and drive into this place.  

From the restaurant we have another 3 hours of driving to get to the hotel.  

We finally reach the hotel and are greated by the hotel clerk who doesn’t know any English.  Dalign helps navigate the language barrier.  We’re handed a menu for breakfast and it doesn’t contain any breakfast items that I can recognize and I’ve had a pretty wide range of items in my lifetime.  Finally he realizes that he’s handed us the wrong menu and I order an omelette with two pieces of toast Judith orders the same as there’s no other egg options.  

We get to our room.  It’s a cabin with a short set of stairs.  We enter and its really no where near as nice as the other places we have been staying.  I thought the blue shag carpet was a unusual choice for a hotel room.   The ceiling fixtures were Kmart gaudy and none of the linens or colour schemes were coordinated which shouldn’t matter but it’s something I’ve come to expect in our hotels.  The room had a separate dressing room behind the far curtain and everything about the room felt somewhat unclean.  The musty smell only added to our feeling that we would make do as we were only staying one night.  

We decided to go and check out the coffee shop to get something to wet our whistles.  Judith orders an Iced cappuccino.  We go over “ice” and “cold”  a few times with the young server.  I have a menu with me and point to several of the drinks displayed on the menus.  He shakes his head at each one I point to and I conclude that they don’t offer any fruit shakes.  Instead I order an iced cappuccino too.  When the order comes, it’s about a 6 oz sized paper cup of hot cappuccino.   Clearly their nods don’t mean they understand what you’re asking for.  

We’re outside on their deck adjacent to the coffee shop.  As far as I can tell, we’re the only tourists.  There seems to be others on site but look to be monthly workers given that they’re all single.  There are newer units but they look very small.  We drink our cappuccinos and then decide to order some dinner  At some point that evening, I see a rat running against the wall of the outside terrance that we’re sitting at.  It’s not great, but as long as they’re outside, I can deal with it.  

We order a vegetable pizza that’s on the menu.  The pizza isn’t very good.  It has cheese and a crust but all the other vegetables didn’t seem right.  I didn’t inspect it too much, but there lots of grey peas in the pizza that were hard - sort of like a green banana hard.  It wasn’t very good.

By this time we decided to go hang out in our rooms because mosquitos were lurking.  While we were sitting and talking, Judith’s eyes suddenly became very wide as she looked past my shoulder and simultaneously let out a very audible, but quiet scream as she covered her mouth with her one free hand that wasn’t pointing over my shoulder.  I turned just in time to see a fast moving object scurry up the corner beam and disappears into the corner of the ceiling.  A rat.  

We looked at each other in disbelief.  Knowing that there was a language barrier we thought it would be good to text our guide who would be staying at a guest house nearby.  Fortunately we had previously exchanged Whatsapp contact information so in an understated text, I sent him the following message:  

 

 

Dalign contacted the desk clerk for us and he eventually came to the room and plugged up the hole with a cloth.  He then left a huge rat trap — the kind that works with sticky paper — in the corner of the room.  Judith indicated that we saw the rat leave so at least it’s not inside.  We both thought that there would be much commotion to have a rat stuck to the trap until it died.  We decided to take down a curtain rod and use it as a club to deal with the rat humanely if it came to that.  

Judith is corresponding with Stephen, our travel agent in the UK, letting him know that there is rat and even if there wasn’t a rat, the hotel isn’t what you want to send your guests to if you want repeat clients.  

Up to this point we we’re making laughs about this whole episode and that we would have a great story when it was all over.  We kind of felt OK enough to to try and get some sleep.  But our humour was lost at 2:00 am that morning when we were both woken up with critter noises in the ceiling.  We used our curtain rod club to beat on the wall and ceiling every time we heard them which was around every hour.  I stayed awake from that initial wake up and got maybe a couple of hours of sleep that entire night.  There was no way I could have fallen asleep knowing rats were overhead or in the walls.  

I had zipped up all my luggage to ensure there would be no intrusion there. 

The next morning we get dressed and headed out to the coffee shop for breakfast.  It was the worst breakfast we had on every measure even accounting for the sleep deprivation experienced.  We packed up our bags and put them out the door as soon as we could.  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.