After three full days of lounging by the Mekong on Don Khon, March 30th came and it was time to move on. We arranged for a boat/minibus transfer combination that would take us to Pakse, where we’d change to a “big bus” for the journey to Tadlo (or Tat Lo or Tatlo – again, depending on what sign you read; Lao people don’t retain any fondness for spaces between words). It went fine, more or less, except that our estimated journey time of six hours turned out to be eight. Not really a big deal, except that we were ushered off the bus and into a village that wasn’t Tadlo. In the dark. Right.
We had an idea of where we wanted to stay, but that didn’t help us – no one had heard of it. After Don Khon, this no longer worried me; locals don’t really have any reason to pay attention to guesthouses, especially ones that aren’t in their own village. Instead, I started asking people to point us to Tadlo and was met with greater success, seeing arms point down the road on which we were already walking. Well, that was a start. The other bit of good news was that the absence of sun made the walk tolerable; had we been doing this mid-afternoon, I would have been much less companionable.
So. We were somewhere in mid-southern Laos, at night, in pitch darkness due to the absence of streetlights, on a road that was one-third gravel, one third tarmac, two-ninths relatively freshly tarred gravel (though I didn’t find that out until I walked through it) and one-ninth dirt. Awesome. After about a half hour of walking, each of us looking like an upright pregnant snail, we saw a sign for a guesthouse up ahead and abandoned plans to stay in our chosen guesthouse in favour of this one because it was here. We went through the process of checking availability and price, but we already knew we’d had enough and weren’t moving. The price was a dollar or two more than I’d hoped, but we dropped our bags in our motel room (no thatch for us!) and went in search of food.
Tadlo is described “as a bit of a travellers’ secret” in the Lonely Planet, which means, to me, it’s anything but. Turns out it’s not really a secret, but it is a sleepy little town that is a pain in the backside to get to. Our exploration of town was remarkably easy – our motel was the first building around the corner from Tadlo’s “main drag”. We walked past the collection of perhaps 20 squat ramshackle buildings and out to the bridge, where we could hear the water tumbling through one of the three cascades for which Tadlo is famous (well, “secretly” famous), and then turned around and headed back to town. The whole walk couldn’t have taken ten minutes. Having experienced a two-hour wait for food while on Don Det, we knew dinner might take awhile if we went somewhere with other people eating there, so we sat down at a table in a little restaurant looking for something small – despite travelling all day, my stomach was rejecting the idea of food in favour of going to sleep. I just wanted a banana shake. No shakes here. Okay, so we moved on to another place and then another, our final choice already being full of travellers (relative to the size of the town). Trouble.
Not only was Sabai Sabai the most unwelcoming place I think I’ve ever been, but the boyfriend of the Spanish cook was too drunk to work (but not too drunk to avoid driving off to get more beer, which took two tries because he spent several minutes trying to get someone else’s motorbike going instead of his own), the cook looked like she’d rather kill me than take our order, the food was painfully slow (not really her fault when she was clearly having to make up for her drunk bf) and, when it arrived, our meal was distinctly worse than mediocre – my banana shake being the worst I’ve ever had since there was no discernible banana content in the two tablespoons of liquid tucked in amongst the unblended ice. Rich’s grilled chicken with fries and salad was equally interesting. The fried chicken was good. The fries were sitting in a pool of oil. Raw, undressed cabbage as a salad? My intestines thought best to avoid it. Somehow, it was the fact that the cook was Spanish (and should, therefore, know better) that made this meal insulting.
Almost more disturbing than the food and the service was the vibe emanating from the place. There was one group playing cards amiably, oblivious to their surroundings; a couple of seniors sitting quietly side-by-side at a table, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else; a pair of French women sitting in the shadows. No mingling. No eye contact. There was also a large group of perhaps eight people gathered on a mat by the service counter. When I went up near them, spotted what looked like it might be either a menu or a personal folder, and asked a question the that effect aloud while reaching for it, a British guy reached out and took it before I got to it, examined it as though he hadn’t heard me, and then handed it back to me without looking at me. “Yeah…” Oh. So you DID hear me, you just chose to act like a prat instead. Got it. A North American girl sitting with that group leapt up upon seeing a friend arrive, flounced over to him and loudly announced, “I’m SO glad you’re here. I’m SO bored.” Apparently, we’d walked right into a high school cafeteria. Tadlo was in the process of making an exceptionally poor first impression.
We went to bed, commenting that everything would look better in the morning. Indeed, it did. The backpacker residents were still odd – overfamiliar with the locals, snobbish with each other unless they were compatriots – but we received our first smiles from Madame Pap, a stern-looking local restaurant owner who had a soft side once you got her going and made a mean banana pancake. The ovaltine-and-condensed-milk caramel sauce on top was something of a revelation for me. I love seeing ingenuity in the kitchen! We laughed as she asked one of the Spaniards if he was leaving today and, when he replied in the affirmative, received a very stern “NO!” in response. Clearly, she likes having “falang” around.
After running to catch up with a young local girl taking her friends out for joyrides using Dad’s motorbike and side cart and then pretending to climb in (which caused a great deal of confusion and gradual smiles), we set off to explore two of the local cascades. We had a good time clambering around on the rocks along the edge of the water while we tried to decide where to swim. Clearly, this wasn’t the place; there were a number of children around, but they were either fishing or playing under water trickling through the rocks in mini-waterfalls. If it’s a good spot to swim, you can be guaranteed the local kids will be in there. The temperature is consistently in the very high thirties and, we suspect, will be climbing into the forties on a regular basis now, so taking advantage of water when it’s available is essential. We walked upstream and found a number of local children swimming in the plateaus amongst the second set of cascades, so we decided to join them to cool off. We deposited our stuff along the water’s edge and slid (quite literally and very definitely without grace) into the water on algae-covered rocks – rather comical for the locals, I’m sure. It is at this point that things went wrong for us, but we wouldn’t know for another twenty minutes or so.
We were having a good little bob around, watching some of the kids muster up the courage to come near us. I was watching a little girl in the shallows a few paces from our stuff, mentally debating whether to take some photos of her or not, when the current seemed to increase dramatically in the space of a several seconds. Rich was laughing and struggling to get a foothold so when he yelped, I turned to look at him, assuming he needed help. He wasn’t looking at me for help, though; he was looking over at our bag and clothes, which were now being swamped due to the water level rising by two or three feet in such a short space of time. I joined in on the yelping, clambered up the now frustratingly slippery rocks and hustled over to our bag as quickly as the slick terrain and rushing water would let me. Scooping everything out of the water and watching the runoff stream from our belongings, the realisation of what had happened hit us: there must be a dam. The dam was opened, the water level changed an inconceivably large amount, and our bag got caught in the resulting deluge. Everything – camera, lenses, memory cards, hard drive containing all of NZ, Borneo and Cambodia photos that had accidentally not been taken out of the bag – was laid out to dry and I gave Rich another half hour or so to swim with the locals. He made friends with Dang and Dong (they really need a friend named Ding) and spent his time launching them into the air. Dang, a smiling cherub-figured kid in his very early teens, was quick to find a way to participate without asking Rich to throw him by hand – instead, he pushed Rich’s head underwater and stood on his shoulders. The result was a comedic series of flips and flops, one of which almost involved Dang landing on Rich’s head when the launch sent Dang straight into the air instead of arcing backwards. The look on Dang’s face as he shot into the air, completely off balance and unprepared to land, was completely unforgettable. The time came to go find rice so that our electronics could be dried out. Easy, right? Nope. I spent some of my afternoon laughing at the irony of my new situation: I was in a village in Asia, looking for rice, and couldn’t find any.
After getting a lift to the market (back where we’d been dropped off the night before, as it turns out), I got lucky: there was a monk who spoke a little English (“Where you from?”) and was able to tell me that the Lao word for rice is “khao”. Armed with my new word, I went back to the driver, who spoke no English, to see if he’d know where I could find rice. “Khao,” I said earnestly, looking at him through the open window. “Oh… Sti. Cky. Or. Steam?” Mental head slap. Of all the English words to learn… And yet, he didn’t know the word “rice”. Anyway, he motioned me to get in and we set off around the corner to a rice shop, where the owner sold me a buck and a quarter’s worth of rice, then handed the banknote over to his two-year old toddler, who magically produced my change in his tiny fist. Hilarious.
Back at the hotel, bags were reorganised to allow for the new arrangement of rice bags and we chatted about what to do next: we felt better about Tadlo, despite the fact that it seemed to have more travellers than locals, but we were unimpressed by its clientele and felt that we would be better off moving on to Thakhek. The rest of our day involved lemon shakes, a dinner that made me suspect that cabbage was the only vegetable available in town, and a long, interesting chat with Geoff and Pilla – the older, very well-travelled couple from the restaurant the night before – about travels past and future. We went to bed feeling better for having had decent interactions with locals and travellers, and looked forward to arriving in Thakhek.
Grateful for: rice
