We just got back down to the Mekong river after a couple days in the highlands of the Bolaven Plateau. The cool mountain air was a welcome escape from quite a few weeks of pretty intense heat.

Coffee is one of Laos’s biggest exports and we were surrounded by coffee plantations. Since we are getting into the coffee harvesting season, the plants were really loaded down with ripe fruit. This begs the question: Why on earth did our hotel’s breakfast offering only include instant coffee??!!

We felt pretty cut off for a couple days with no internet available in any hotels or in any of the very limited area restaurants.

Transportation options were pretty limited as well. When we left the Plateau for our next stop in Pakse this morning, our best option was to take a sawngthaew, which is a pickup truck converted with benches to cart lots of people between villages. Since we were the last of the 30 people to cram into this one, we had to a squeeze onto a metal rack sticking out of the back — standing room only. Good thing the ride was only an hour!

Here in Champasak we are staying at a place called The River Resort. We have a nicely furnished little bungalow with a wonderful terrace overlooking the Mekong. Watching the sun come up over the river is incredibly peaceful.

We intended to stay here for three days, but Jim has been recovering from a cold and couldn’t bear to leave this heavenly spot. So, as we do with increasing frequency, we added a day to our stay. It worked wonders for Jim’s ailments.

Later this morning we will head a little northeast to get up into the Bolaven Plateau. There we expect to spend a couple days around coffee plantations, water falls, and considerably cooler weather. We don’t expect to have any Internet access there.

Then we’ll come back down to the Mekong and continue our northward journey up into Central Laos.

From the Four Thousand Islands in southern Laos, we took a bus yesterday a few hours further up the Mekong river to Champasak. The highlight of the area is Wat Phu Champasak, the ruins of an ancient Khmer religious complex that climbs dramatically up the side of a mountain. This morning we bicycled out to see it.

It was a pleasant 15 km ride each way, despite the poor quality of the bikes and the pretty intense heat. At first the temple complex didn’t look like too much. While it might have once rivaled Angkor Wat in importance in the Khmer empire, there just wasn’t that much left. But as we climbed the steps further up the mountain, we discovered a photographer’s paradise of scattered ruins, dramatic vistas, and colorful shrines.