The last part of the road to Pakxan was pleasant and very quiet. We only stopped a few times to take pictures. First stop was for an unusual bit of roadkill. Not sure what type of snake it is but wouldn’t want to step on it in the dark! Next stop was to look at the cows. Even the fully grown ones are only about 1.2 m to the tip of their horns. The calves are the size of dogs.
The houses on the side of the road still built in the traditional way with hardwood stilts. On some of the ones we saw later the hardwood stilts had been replaced with reinforced concrete posts.
We joined Route 13 at Pakxan which was the biggest and busiest road since entering Laos, although you still could not say that the traffic was heavy. Route 13 follows the Mekong at this point, which is absolutely gigantic. It looks to be more than 1 km wide. We had the normal audience of small curious children as we cooked our meal.
We continued along route 13 where the traffic consists of either new looking Toyota pickups, coaches, timber lorries, motorbikes or the multi purpose tractor units which are used for ploughing fields, moving rice and family transport. They are literally everywhere in Laos. People have to be fairly patient when covering any distance as they only travel at about 10km an hour.
Further along the road Graham jumped out of the car to buy a few bananas. Ten minutes later he came back with at least 5kg of bananas and one huge pineapple……… far too much, but it only costs the equivalent of 140p.
We finally left the mountains behind us after having travelled through them all the way from Xian in China. It is a huge range of mountains covering thousands of kilometers.
We found a place to stop for the night which seemed to be amenity land which is by a small river, so that we could wash the car and has it own pump for fresh water.
troopytracks 