Valentine's day!

Pakse has little to offer other than a gateway to Si Phan Don -Four Thousand Islands - and the road to Cambodia, the Bolaven Plateau and its coffee plantations and trekking opportunities or the road to the Thai border. It is also within easy reach of the Khmer ruins at Wat Phou which can be reached by road or by boat. We chose the boat trip and spent a pleasant day cruising down the Mekong - with a stop at a very old and decrepit Wat with only one remaining monk - to Champassak and a tuktuk ride to the temple site.

Arriving 5 days before the Maha Puja celebrations meant that whole site was crowded with traders, entertainments, food stalls - even a mobile ATM - in preparation for the million or more visitors expected for the full moon celebrations and merit-making. This is the largest Khmer site outside Cambodia and I am sure it is a lovely place to visit at any other time but it felt more like a fairground with hawkers and traders in every open space around the ruins.

A very pleasant lunch in a riverside restaurant before our return journey was spoiled when our Swiss travelling companion discovered that his Iphone - with all his photos, contacts etc., from 3 months on the road - had been misplaced. By the time we got back to Pakse it was clear that someone had taken it and removed the sim card - he spent an hour or two grieving the loss of all the information but then put it behind him and started organising the rest of his trip.

Our guide for the day had spoken reasonable english and we had fun teasing him about his plans for Valentine's Day. Having booked a table at the Panorama restaurant - on the rooftop of our hotel - and allegedly the best place to eat in town - I was feeling quite smug. I reckoned without the organising skills of our French Hotel manager who had managed to screw up the booking so that we ended up having dinner on bar stools while the rest of the diners had white linen and roses for all the ladies - on top of that the food was nothing special.

We were glad to leave the place for our bus ride to the islands.