In which I get a little bit crabby

The rest of my day on the motorbike was amazing. I rode to a massage and sauna place a little outside of town and had a traditional Thai massage. This is done while wearing pajamas and involves the masseuse using her body as a lever to manipulate and stretch parts of yours. Actually, it's quite enjoyable, just very different from Swedish massage. The grand total for my hour-long massage: 20,000 Kip, or about $2. All the massage girls kept looking at me and giggling when I was done and sitting drinking a cup of tea. I realized later that I had gone to a very local place, not the one I had intended. But it was a nice slice of local life.

I began to get crabby the next day as I waited for our boat to leave for its trip down the Mekong to Champasak. As far as I could tell, the only impediment to our departure was the boatman, who was sitting there on shore smoking yet another cigarette and waving at me when I motioned that it was time to leave. I was also crabby because I realized I didn't have my camera, and wasn't at all sure that I hadn't lost it the day before on the motorbike. Once we got started, the trip down the Mekong to Champasak was lovely. Although it was a hot day, the breeze moving past us cooled things off. We passed numerous villages on the shores, and people in boats fishing among the large rocks in the river.

I was also crabby because the boat dropped us off, not at the public boat landing, but at a guest house almost 1 Km north of there, where you were almost forced to rent their conveniently more expensive bicycles. And the boatman, after leaving 1/2 hour late, tried to tell me to be back at 2:00, not the stated time of 3:00. I told him he would be lucky if I showed up before 3:30 ( Ok, I was crabby).

The bicycle ride from Champasak to the Angkor-era ruins of Wat Champasak was a delight. I don't think that many falangs ride through these villages and so all the children were very friendly, waving to me and smiling as I rode past. I could not believe how difficult it was to cycle just 10 km under that mid-day sun. I was exhausted by the time I reached the entrance to the ruins. But it's amazing what one liter of water and a glass of lemon juice (what everyone in Asia seems to call lemonade) will do for you.

The ruins of Wat Phu Champasak are lovely, striking, and blessedly free of tourists. Well, that was my impression until I stepped the wrong way off a rock and decided walking on the uneven ground was no longer a good idea. I limped back to the entrance and managed to convince a lovely pair of older Swiss tourists to give me and my bicycle a ride back to Champsak. Along the way, I also met the nicest cat in Laos, who sat on my lap, purred, and decided my arms needed some grooming.

The boat ride back was blessedly uneventful, and once again a lovely way to see the river. But once back at the guesthouse and after looking in all the places I had been the day before, I was forced to conclude that my camera was gone. Thankfully all my pictures from HK and Vietnam are saved to disk, but those from Laos were not. Why couldn't I have lost something less important. You know, like my passport :)

My final impression of Laos is of a young monk in his orange robes on the back of a motorbike smiling and laughing at the sight of a sweaty falang (me) riding along the Mekong on a crappy blue bicycle. I have no idea why that's funny, but I am thrilled to have brought some humor into his day!!