Tag Archives: volunteer

Day 202 – Coffee encounters

Were on the road real early today

Were on the road real early today

Sekong had seemed incredibly sleepy last night…it didn’t get any better in the morning. Despite the fact that Lao people seem to get up at 6am to go about their day during daylight hours, the town looked positively abandoned. Also, there was no breakfast to be had here, at least not of the baguette and jam kind. To increase our chance of yet another French inspired start into the day, we packed everything on Rocinante and left the town at 7am.

Up on the plateau, it was chilly this early in the morning; for the first time in a while, I wished for something to stop the wind from getting through. We had a look for breakfast places along the road but didn’t see anything except for rice porridge. Thus, we needed to drive 80km to Paksong, the next town on the loop. The route was pretty, though. Full of views over small valleys and the opportunity to see waterfalls. So early in the day, we also had the road almost to ourselves. Continue reading →

Day 198 – Elephants!

Man, I was excited for this day. Getting up at 6am and chomping down our breakfast pancakes so we could go meet the pick-up van at 7am in front of Cafe Hefalump. When we arrived at 6.50am, it soon dawned on us (mostly me) that the instruction email might have had some mistakes in it. Ours stated to be at the cafe at 7am for a 7.10am departure, so please have had breakfast already…which we had. All the other participants, however, arrived at 7am to sit down in the cafe, have their coffee and a breakfast cookie/cake. Luckily, departure was at 7.30am so we didn’t have to wait too long but I was slightly jealous of the cake for breakfast.

Instruction speech in the morning

Instruction speech in the morning

A Dutch girl, Sabine, from our guesthouse showed up, too, so we had someone to talk to on the way to the Elephant Valley Project. The ride in the van was bumpy and very dusty, at least in the back row. All the dust from the 4WD seemed to be sucked up through the air vents to slowly settle down inside the car. When we stopped, I was happy to leave the dust trap and meet our guide for the day: John. He looked to be about 20 years old and is a volunteer at the project for one year.

The project offers different deals on seeing elephants; Flo and I had decided to go on a full day of elephant spotting instead of volunteering in the afternoon which would have made the whole thing cheaper but we would have seen less elephants. Continue reading →