There were no customs at the Cambodian side to stamp my bike out of the country in my Carnet. There was a customs building on the Lao side about 7 kilometers from the border. However, when I stopped there, there was only one person in a hammock next to a volleyball field and he couldn’t speak a word of English. So after a while trying I gestured if I could simply continue on my way. He didn’t understand that either so I just went, no stamp  in my Carnet confiming my entry into Laoseither.

Just a few kilometers behind the border I turned to see some waterfalls on Mekong. I paid a dollar as I didn’t have any Kip on me yet (otherwise it is 9000 Kip and a dollar is about 10 600 Kip) and in rain I approached the site. Fortunately they have quite a good setup there with big gazebo with a perfect view of the waterfalls.

After that it was a 150-kilometer ride to Pakxe which is the first bigger city. There it was time to find a place for the night.

It wasn’t hard to find Sabaidee 2 guesthouse (N15.12331 E105.80214) that was full of people. This guesthouse is great.  Their very friendly and helpful service is visibly paying off. I met quite a few interesting people there. Among these were Ushi (Belgian girl), Ester (Spanish girl), Stefan (German guy) and Andy (Swiss guy) who I had dinner with. Amazingly, I also met Craig again – a Canadian traveler who I met in Cameron Highlands in Malaysia the first time. I didn't know it yet by I was about to spend next few days with these great guys.

Later that night I also talked to a couple of other Germans who have been traveling for years, living on about 2 to 3 dollars a day including accommodation. I thought that was amazing. They traveled the whole world like this and still don’t have enough.

There was also Nachom – a very funny Israeli guy who was the last person to join our party for the next few days.

My last note for today has to be about the state of development of Laos and the roads. So far I am very surprised about Laos in this respect. Laos is supposed to be even poorer than Cambodia and I wasn’t expecting any city-like cities. And yet, the road changed from total shit to a perfect road just a few kilometers after crossing the unofficial border and Pakxe seems to be quite a big and developed city – certainly much more than I have expected to see for any city in Laos. And the road is not only perfect, but what makes it even better is that there are almost no vehicles on it. I think that I wouldn’t need much more than the fingers on my two hands to count the vehicles I passed on the first 150 kilometers. Oh, and the road signs are probably the best from among the countries I have seen so far. They not only tell you the distance to a village or a tourist attraction that they point to but this distance is marked there with tenth of a kilometer accuracy which I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world so far.