Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lowing this, Champasak's king, Kam Souk, had to travel to Pakse to swear his allegiance to
France.
In 1946, Kam Souk's son,
Prince Boun Oum na Champasak
, renounced his claim to the
throne of a sovereign Champasak (in exchange for the title of Inspector General for life) and
recognized the king of Luang Prabang as the royal head of a unified Laos, effectively ending
the Champasak royal line. When he fled Laos after the communist takeover in the mid-1970s,
the Prince said the kingdom was doomed from the start because of Nang Pao's misdemean-
our: “With an unmarried mother as queen, everything started so badly that the game was lost
before it began.”
Pakse
Capitalizing on its location at the confluence of the Xe Don and the Mekong rivers, roughly
halfway between the Thai border and the fertile Bolaven Plateau,
PAKSE
is the far south's
biggest city. For travellers, the place is mostly a convenient stopover en route to Si Phan Don
and Wat Phou, though it's also a more comfortable base than Paksong for exploration of the
Bolaven Plateau and nearby NBCAs, and the border crossing to Thailand just west at Chong
Mek makes Pakse a logical entry or exit point for travellers making a north-south tour of
Laos.
Unlike other major Mekong towns, Pakse is not an old city. Rather it has risen in prominen-
ce, from relatively recent beginnings a hundred years ago as a French administrative centre,
to being the region's most important market town, attracting traders from Salavan, Attapeu,
Xekong and Si Phan Don, as well as from Thailand. The diverse and rapidly growing popu-
lation of Vietnamese, Lao and Chinese today numbers some eighty thousand.
Nestling between the Mekong and a bend of the Xe Don, Pakse's centre, where you'll find
the market and most of the hotels and restaurants, is surrounded by water on three sides. For
some reason the streets in the centre of the city have all been laid out diagonally, but it's such
a small place that finding your way around isn't a problem. Along No. 11 Road, the street
that follows the Xe Don, are a few remaining examples of crumbling Franco-Chinese
shop
houses
and the town's main temple,
Wat Luang
. Turning away from the river here, you'll
soon find yourself by the big new
Champasak Plaza Shopping Centre
, built on the site of
the old market that was razed by fire in 1998.
As more and more tourists make their way south to Pakse, the number of
day-trip options
has begun to grow.
BanSaphai
, a silk-weaving village north of the city, offers the chance to
see villagers weaving
sin
according to age-old practices, and experience life in a traditional
town on the island of
DonKho
in the middle of the Mekong. In the hills south of the city, the
villagers of
Kiatngong
raise elephants, which can be hired for trekking, while nearby
Ban
Phapho
presents the opportunity to observe elephants being trained for work in the forest.
