Wednesday 26th March 2008

Apparently 5.45am is karaoke time in Laos. If it's not, then there must be some other reason why the driver thought it was necessary to BLAST OUT his dvd at this time of the morning. With everyone wide awake on the bus we all watched as he pulled up into the town of Paske. I didn't sleep too well last night. It was nice sharing a bed with Nikki, but the driver thought he was in some sort of rally race and was throwing us all over the road. We all climbed off safely at just after 6.30am and a group of us jumped onto the back of a tuk-tuk, who took us round to some guest houses. After finding somewhere to stay we went out for some breakfast and then wandered around the streets. Paske isn't a very big place, we just used it as a place to break up the journey between Vientiane and Four Thousand Islands.

While we were out and about, we spotted out tuk-tuk driver from earlier and he offered to take us out to the nearby waterfalls for a knock-down price. We had nothing better to do, so we went for it. Little did we know it, but boy did we have to earn that 'knock-down' price!

The first of the waterfalls was about an hour away and our driver forgot he had taken his tuk-tuk to work today and thought he was in his Porsche. He was driving at about 100mph (not really, but it seemed that way) and overtaking everything in sight, when all of a sudden there was a massive BANG! and something exploded. We rolled to a stop on the side of the road and he grabbed his tool kit and fixed the problem before we drove on... much slower. Further down the road, water started spitting everywhere and the driver looked worried so we pulled over... again. This time, the problem took longer to fix and he couldn't get it going again. Me and Nikki stepped out to let him do his thing when all of a sudden he looked at us and started nodding. We asked if he wanted a push and he got more and more excited. So, there we were trying to push this rickety old tuk-tuk down the road while the driver is sat on the front shouting 'SPEED, SPEED' at us - whatever the problem was, we obviously sorted it because he shot off down the road, before turning round and collecting us. After all the excitement, we'd forgot about the waterfalls and were surprised when we arrived. Because of 'pit stops', we only had about fifteen minutes at the first one - Tad Fane Falls. The next ones, Tad Yueang Waterfalls, were much better and we got to climb all the way down to the bottom.

If we'd thought the journey back was going to be any less eventful, then we were wrong. About half way back, our driver screeched to a halt and started speaking to a motorbike driver on the side of the road. The next thing we know, we've been told to get out so that they could get the rider AND HIS BIKE into the back! Poor old Nikki had to sit and hold onto the bike for the rest of the journey - doing her best to stop it falling out of the back, while I sat up front, next to the driver, on a cushion about 10cm square... with the petrol tank between my legs!

This evening we wandered around town and then on our way back to the guest house went for an Indian meal. The food was EXCELLENT and we left both full and extremely happy. When we got back to the room, we had showers, packed our bags and then crashed out on the bed.

After that, we'll never look at a tuk-tuk in the same way again!