Christmas in Laos

Since we will spend Christmas Eve on a local bus between sacks of rice, crying babies, and chickens on the roof, we have decided to celebrate Christmas one day later. But first, let's talk about the 24th evening. In the evening, we take the bus to Pakse, the third largest city in Laos with 120,000 inhabitants, which is also located on the Mekong River.

We arrive at the bus station located outside the city at 1 am, even ahead of schedule. After arguing with our tuk-tuk driver because he suddenly wanted to see four times the price and we refused to pay that, we arrived at our hostel. Before waking up the owners, we quickly eat something at the soup kitchen on the corner. My soup is good, unfortunately Max gets rice soup with offal. At first, we are annoyed about the wrong translation, but when we realize that this is our Christmas meal, we laugh about it.

We then enter our hostel through the back entrance and after what feels like an eternity of shouting, we finally wake someone up. So, we can finally check in and sleep :) However, the sleep is short-lived, since Max eventually wakes me up. At first, I'm annoyed and want to go back to sleep, but then I see that our room is flooded. Max is standing in ankle-deep water. For a moment, I consider ignoring it. After all, the bed is raised and I already dried it off and made it warm. But then I see that our things are also wet, so I'm awake. There seems to be a pipe burst in the bathroom, and the entire lower floor is underwater. We are the only guests on that floor and are given a room on a higher floor. Since the sun is already scorching hot, we hang our things up to dry. Thankfully, the electronics were upstairs and remained dry. But sleeping is no longer an option, of course. Well, this is a Christmas story we can tell our children :-D
From noon on the first day of Christmas, Christmas finally begins for us. We take a tuk-tuk to the most expensive hotel in the city. There, we booked a room on the 8th floor with a view of the Mekong River for one night. We spend the day at the pool. The weather is perfect and the outdoor facilities are very beautiful and well-maintained.

However, the service is lacking, typical for Laos. In such a hotel, I would have thought that they would take our backpacks and not have us carry them to our room ourselves. Even in some hostels, they would guide us to our room. But it doesn't matter, the pool is great and that's what matters to us. In the evening, we dress up (as much as possible with our rather functional backpacker wardrobe) and go to the overpriced restaurant in the hotel. The cocktails were great, but the food was not so good.

But the breakfast buffet the next morning was a dream!!! Nutella and peanut butter as much as you want, fruit, hot dishes, noodles, soups, eggs in all variations, cereals, yogurt, muffins... After eating by the pool, I was carrying quite a food baby. On the second day of Christmas, we spend a few more hours at the pool until we take a tuk-tuk to the bus station at 12. We're heading south again: The 4000 Islands!