The happiest day of my life. 30 images that will make you smile.

Like most good trips this one starts with a stupid mistake. Accidentally buying a bus ticket to Udon instead to Ubon I landed 400km away from my goal.

The destination was south Laos. But here I am in the mid of the country. So I decide to take a short visit to the capital Vientiane. Big cities can’t win me over so I hopped on the first bus down toward 4000 islands. Described by many traveler as the sweetest place in South East Asia. It’s the place that consumes you, makes you forget that you have a live. I heard stories of investment bankers who visited for 2 days and ended up serving pumpkin burger, smoking funny smelling cigarettes and swimming close to waterfalls as a day job.

“Pakse is a shithole”. I prove you wrong.

One thing all my travel advices had in common was the disapproval of the city Pakse where I wanted to stay overnight before moving on. “Pakse is a shithole”, “There is nothing in Pakse”, “Do not go there” were some of the advices I got. This is the story of me going there and actually having the best day of my life. I took one of those night busses where you share a bed with a stranger. My bedmate was a mid 40’s “drug experience designer”. He listens to the needs of their customer and mixes individual highs to give them the ultimate experience for their trip. He shared some funny trip stories and ate a couple of vicodins while talking himself to sleep. (dr. house favourite painkiller).

We arrived 6am…

….checked in a hostel, rented a motorbike and thats when I met Xenia. She was mid 20’s dutch girl with a big smile. A local person gave us a hand drawn map of the area. And since both of us were adventurous we decided to go check out the area. The fields around Pakse were organised planned rubber trees. Hundreds of thousands of them. It reminded me of the opening cemetery scene from “Cruel Intentions”. Driving down the main round outside of town watching over the field of trees I decided to take a right turn at a random moment. We drove for a quite some time but all you could see was trees for miles and miles. Until one point we came to a steep hill. The motorbike had manual gear. So when we didn’t make that hill I switched gear. Suddenly the vehicle rose up and we speeded up the hill on one wheel. A few cm more left and we would have fallen down a 20m cliff. That was heart attack number 1 on that day.

View from the bus when the day started

Houndreds of thousands of rubber trees

Collecting the fluid

Rubber tree fluid & chicken playing with the sand

Next we stopped at a coffee plantation. We convinced the owner with our hands to give us a tour around his field and bought some of his organic coffee. It was then when I learned that coffee is actually a fruit. The inner core gets sun-dried and adapts the roasted flavour. Here’s a good advice for you:

I kept several coffee beans in my shirt pocket. Whenever I was getting tired i crunched one of them and rebooted my system. Became a tasty habit since that day.

This is how coffee looks like. Yes, it's a fruit!

Waterfall, hell yeah !

One of the reasons we started the trip was to get to see some waterfalls. Unknowingly we passed several until we recognised an image of water with the number 5 next to it. You probably have guessed it, but travelling in Asia without speaking the language can be difficult. We did make it to the waterfall and it was beautiful. Whenever I find a suitable spot I take time to wander around and shot images. To shoot a good picture you have to blend in with the environment almost get invisible and wait. I hid behind the waterfall and watched several people getting massaged by the massive pressure of the water. When one of them — lets call him Baloo the bear — discovered me I took a snap. See the gallery.

Kool & The Gang

The hand drawn map roughly showed a roundtrip of 250km around the area ending at the starting point. By then we were already around 40km outside of town and it was just noon. So Xenia and me decided to go for more. We took a left turn and passed fields, small mountains and local villages. It was all just beautiful to watch. After around half the trip we found a small school on the left side of the open road. My friend suggested to take a stop there which I am grateful for until this day.

We entered the school yard and there was an immediate change of feeling for the whole school. Imagine this: We enter enter a playground with dozens of kids who have never seen a white person before. The whole school came running to see the “attraction”. But no one touched us. I felt like Son Goku having an Aura. I had an invisible 1 meter radius that none of the kids dared to enter.

It was like this moment when two cats meet for the first time and analyse each other. Nobody spoke english and obviously I did neither speak thai or lao. We started to communicate with what we had. Tones, hands, high fives, football. I played around with the ball. How they started to giggle and laugh. It was hilarious. Those kids were incredibly happy. Everyone wanted to play or get some sort of interaction from me.

The boys were more playful..

The girls were rather reserved and shy

The moment I took out my camera was the one where everything turned. I gained their trust by taking pictures and showing them around. These kids have never seen a picture of themselves before. It was incredible how excited and amazed they were seeing their own faces and voices in a video.Me and Xenia got looked at each other, speechless, sharing this wonderful experience. When school ended and all the kids walked down the same road (well there was only 1) we drove to the very front of the line, got off the bike and gave every single kid in the school a high five. Some of them ran back in line just to get a second or third one.

In one day I had an outburst of so many emotions. I met a stranger and traveled 250 km around a place I had absolutely no knowledge of. It’s worth mentioning that on the way back within a hair’s breadth we had a major accident. And when darkness came we realised the motorbike had no lights. So the last 40km we drove in complete darkness with the light from a phone. The risk was all worth the journey.