Charmed by Champasak

Sunrise view from our room

We love this place. Champasak, southern Laos, the former royal capital is basically a string of small villages on two quiet parallel roads that run along the west bank of the Mekong. It’s the right size of town with just a few tourists - enough to give us basic requirements such as a handful of western-style restaurants and guest houses, some English or French speaking help when needed, and yet not so many to feel that we’re invading the community. Locals are friendly and welcoming. The children still wave and call “sabaidee!”. And there’s very little traffic – hooray!

To the west of us the Lingaparvata Mountain rises from the plains. It is topped by a natural pillar-shaped 10m rock formation – hence its spiritual importance and association with Shiva. Most visitors come here for the ruins of the Angkor temple of Wat Phou which nestles at the base of the mountain.

This is the remarkable Lingaparvata (Phu Kao) mountain, topped with its natural nipple.

Our hosts Jacques (Belgian) and his Lao wife One (pronounced “Wan”) have built rooms and a restaurant overlooking the river. We sit on the balcony facing eastward, towards the horizontal shore of Don Daeng island, where the water buffalo wallow in the shallows, as millions of tons of water flow gently down from China. It’s very tranquil.

Our room is on the right. The house was only completed last month so it has all mod-cons

And there’s even a bar with five pool tables in it down the road! It’s very much a locals place so we haven’t tried it out yet...

That's what you call a view - over the Mekong

There are a couple of fine royal residences from French colonial times (1950s) on our street

But most of the town is more like this. Note the traffic!

We came across the local potter and swopped stories with our limited common languages. Lovely man

Yesterday we borrowed bikes and cycled 13 km down river to the ancient but unnamed 5^th century city on the banks of the river. It’s little more than earthworks hidden in the scrub but it’s the gateway to possibly my favourite place on Earth (currently) – the temple of Wat Phou. This is what Angkor Wat must have been like to visit 50 years ago. There were perhaps a dozen tourists on the whole site when we were there.

The avenue leading to Wat Phu. The current temple was built during the reign of Jayavarman VII in the 12th century but there have been temples around here since the 5th century. A road leads from here all the way to Angkor Wat in Cambodia.