From Tadlo I went to Champasok, a town nearby the Vat Phou temple complex. These temples were build by the same people that build the Angkor temples in Cambodia, but they are a lot older, as they were build before the people moved down south. Most of the complex has been destroyed, but I thought it would be a nice idea to see this first, before I visit Angkor…

The town is located right next to the mighty Mekong river, so to get into town I had to take a small ferry ride over the river. When I arrived it was already pretty late, so I didn’t do anything that day. While hanging around, I ran into Bram and Tina, some guys I already met in Luang Prabang. They just came from the temples and were leaving the next day, so we met for dinner and exchanged some travel stories. On the next morning I rented a bicycle and had a nice ride to the temple complex 8km outside of the town. It was really hot and not much shadow around, so a lot of water was a must. There was a small museum at the entrance of the complex, but that wasn’t really interesting for me, so I passed through that pretty quickly and then started exploring the complex. All of the buildings were located on the foot and on the top of a nearby mountain with a big street leading up to it.

The buildings on the foot of the mountain looked really interesting, but unfortunately they were in the middle of renovating them, so it wasn’t allowed to go inside. It’s really impressive to see what kind of nice buildings they were able to build thousands of years ago.

The next step was climbing up the hundreds of stairs leading up the mountain. At times they were very steep and not in the best condition, but it was a lot of fun going up and imagining how all that must have looked, when it was filled with life by all the people, when Champasok was the capital of the Khmer empire.

On the top there were some smaller temples, surrounded by a steep stone wall and tons of plants and trees.

The weather was really good, so you could see very far from the top, but unfortunately there wasn’t much to see, as the south of Laos is pretty flat!

As I started very early, it was only noon when I returned back to Champasok, but the bus leaving south to the 4000 islands (where I wanted to go next and where Bram and Tina also went) had already left, so I had to spend the rest of the day sitting around and surfing the web, as there wasn’t anything to do in the town, besides visiting Vat Phou…

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