Day 107 Secret Millionaire

19/06/13
I woke around half 8 then I had breakfast and only left the restaurant to catch my oat back to the mainland at 11.00. During the crossing it started to rain, added to the fact that the bus was a good 5 minutes walk away most people were rather damp by the time we got on the bus around half past. The bus was meant to take 3 hours but it ended up being 4 because we stopped for some unfounded reason for half an hour. When we arrived back in Pakse I tried booking a bus ticket to Vietnam for that evening but the tourist office said he bus was a local one and it wasn't very good. Unfazed I booked it anyway and then spent the next 2 hours waiting. I wandered around for half an hour, spending the last 1000 Kip (less than 10p) on a packet of instant noodles I ate uncooked, then returned to the booking office to wait out the remainder of the time. At 17.00 I was driven to the bus station along with a Malay-Aussi who comes to Laos a lot. At the bus station it became apparent that there wasn't going to be a bus leaving that evening. This turned out not to be an issue as the Aussi, named Tony, said he had a spare bed in his room I could use and he also took me out for dinner which was really generous. It turned out that Tony, who was only 39, was a property tycoon (earning $2000 a day) and most of our conversations were centred around the stuff he has done for the Laos people. He has come to Laos 6 times now and has paid for toilets to be built, bought hundreds of dollars worth of food for poor families, bought a $3000 tractor for a family whose father couldn't work, bought 3 plots of land on a coffee plantation for a couple he brought back from Bangkok who had been working in the sex industry. There were many more that he didn't have time to tell although I wish there had been because he showed me some pictures and the faces of the people he had made smile. He has not only fallen in love with the country but also with a local woman, even though he is married with 2 kids in Australia. Proof nobody is perfect or has it all.