Wat Phou Festival | Campasak | Laos
After my lovely experience with Samart in Chiang Mai, I flew to Phuket for my first destination wedding, with Philippines-based photographer Julian Abram Wainwright. Stay tuned for the photos on my wedding blog. I will be returning to Phuket later next month to shoot two more weddings, so I will save my Phuket post until then. After a few days of chilling out, I flew to Ubon where I prepared to cross the Thai border to Laos and meet Jim, my travel partner for the next few weeks.
From Ubon airport, I took a taxi to the bus station, where I waited for a few hours to catch a bus to the Chong Mek border crossing. On the bus, I met a young novice monk, and we chatted for quite some time, as he enjoyed practicing his English. From the drop off point, I made my way on a motorbike taxi to the border where I got my passport stamped and received my visa ($35 if you pay in USD $42 if you pay in Thai Baht). Apart from the poorly marked paths and a little confusion, it was a fairly simple crossing that took about 30 minutes. From there, I grabbed a minibus to the guesthouse where Jim and I had planned to rendezvous. Jim and I met on couchsurfing.org in the South East Asia forums while we were planning our trips. We decided, despite never meeting or talking on the phone, that we would travel together for almost three weeks in Laos. Jim is a young older guy (51 but passes for 40), and we proved to get on well…most of the time (a brother-sister dynamic ensued!)
I was eager to explore Laos, and see how it differed from Thailand. Laos is the first communist country I have visited, and I was curious to see how, if any, the communist state influenced the culture. I will talk more about this in later posts. Jim and I spent our first few nights in Pakse, which is mostly a border crossing town, but we found it quite nice. We had a delicious dinner (Tom Yom soup—decided to skip the “pork bowels”) on the Mekong as the sun went down at a lively spot where many locals were gathered drinking beers. Before bed, we enjoyed some traditional Lao herbal massages, which are quite divine (and cost $4-6/hour!). Unfortunately, by this time, I had become quite sick due to an air conditioner in Phuket, but with a few days rest, I was back to normal.
The (usually) sleepy town of Champasak was our first official destination in Laos. Along with thousands of Lao locals, we were headed to the full moon festival at Wat Phou, one of the oldest archeological sites in Laos. Constructed in the 9th century, it was a holy site for Hindus and later Buddhists. Once annually, during the full moon on the third lunar month, there is a religious festival held at the site, and it just so happened to coincide with our travel plans. Unfortunately, today the ruins are just that—in ruin—and in danger of crumbling, even as organizations in France and Japan work to restore them (Wat Phou is a UNESCO World Heritage Site).
After spending our first day wondering the festival’s huge market in the incredible midday heat, we decided to take a break on following day, by hiring a boat to take us to the tiny fishing island across the river, Don Daeng. We had planned to spend most of the day on along the shore under the sun. But before settling in, we ventured off for a little walk. Fast forward four hours later; we were lost, exhausted, and burdened by aching feet (with only our flimsy flip-flops shielding them from the ground). We gravely underestimated the width of the island, and thus ended up walking 25K over the course of five hours in brutal mid day Laos heat. This was an immense challenge for me physically and mentally, and I had to prevent myself from stopping for breaks, because I knew we needed to keep going. We considered backtracking multiple times, (and should have) but we just kept going. Though strenuous, we saw some beautiful sites along the way; children riding bikes in front of a temple, kids playing with push carts, and families making sticky rice over fire in tubes of bamboo. When we finally arrived in familiar territory, we enjoyed a half hour of swimming in the murky Mekong before the boat returned to pick us up. We also noticed that had we walked right instead of left, there was a beautiful eco-resort with a swimming pool and bar, where we could’ve spent the day relaxing!
On the last day of the festival, we climbed to the top of Wat Phou ruins. The temple was lit by hundreds of candles that the monks had set ablaze at dawn as part of an extensive alms blessing. Walking up these glowing ruins at dusk was a spiritual experience for me. Incense burned strongly from all directions, monks and nuns stationed at various places offered blessings, and near the top, I watched children and families collect water from a fresh water spring that trickled through the cracks of the ruins. It has been flowing for thousands of years, and the water is believed to be holy. And just as the festival began winding down, dozens of lanterns began floating into the sky…between the moon, the candles, and the lanterns, it was like sitting atop a spiritual dreamland.
Other than Wat Phou, there isn’t much to see or do in Champasak. It’s a small village that runs by nature’s clock, and like many cities and towns, is sustained by and dependent upon the Mekong. Even as there were hoards of people coming and going for the festival, the vibe was still completely relaxing. It contains only one dusty “main street,” which has a fair number guesthouses (we had no problem getting a room without booking in advance). Unlike many other travelers we ran into, Jim and I were traveling south to north in Laos, which enabled us to exchange useful information with our fellow travelers. From Champasak, we headed even further south to the fabled “4000 islands,” which many call paradise.
