It’s not summertime, but the livin’ is definitely easy – and with the mercury passing 39 today, it might as well be summer.
The sun is setting on our last evening on Don Khon, Si Phan Don – Laos’s Four Thousand Islands. It’s not going to be a sunset to remember (unlike the spectacular one we caught glimpses of while we were trying to sort out our transfer to the island), but from my perch on the deck with a glass of Lao whiskey, facing the Mekong and watching as fish hurl themselves into the air, this sunset will do just fine.
Tonight is our fourth night on Don Khon – the longest we’ve stayed in any one spot in the last 3 months – and what a stay it has been.
On our way here, we spent six very hot, very long hours waiting for a bus in Stung Treng, Cambodia, despite letting four backpackers off the minibus so they could catch their bus with no wait at all. Welcome to the realities of Cambodian travel – it’s all down to where you buy your ticket. Our bus was an hour late, meaning we had to pay the $1 “overtime fee” at the border. Fine. A dollar isn’t a big deal. But then we reached Nakasang, where the boats to the islands leave from. The overtime fee for having to go out at night gets much steeper here – 30,000 kip instead of 15,000 ($4 instead of $2 each) and then another 50,000 kip to get a boat from Don Det (the main backpacker strip) to Don Khon (quieter, with fewer of those 20-something Sihanoukville party-goers) because there is no road transport over the bridge at night. Ouch. We reluctantly parted with the cash, knowing that we had no other choice – except walking 4km with our packs.
After getting in the boat and setting off, though, I realised that the two boatmen deserved every penny. It’s the dry season here, meaning that every single one of the 4000 tiny islands is sticking at least a nose out of the water to see what’s happening. These guys navigated the route seemingly from memory in a night so dark I couldn’t see five feet ahead of me. Moving slowly in our low long-tail boat, they just turned on a flashlight a couple of times to check the size of fallen trees that lurked in the darkness. Imagine our Thousand Islands with an extra couple hundred rocky shoals jutting partially out of the water, and then imagine piloting a boat through there in the dark with no navigation equipment. Hmmmm… No thanks.
Once we reached Don Khon, I had several worry-filled moments when no one seemed to have heard of our guesthouse and the boatmen seemed to think it was back on the island we had come from. We persevered and asked more locals as we walked, and it was with great relief that we found someone who pointed, with great authority, down the road and said “500 metres.” It seemed like a rather long 500m, but there it was. Twelve hours after leaving Ban Lung on a seven hour journey, we had finally reached our next “home”.
Since arriving, we’ve cycled over to check out Don Det to see if it’s as bad as some people make it sound. The guesthouses and restaurants are in a tightly-packed jumble at the head of the island, but we haven’t ever seen a throbbing party scene like we were expecting. We suspect people operate on a steady intake of their drink/smoke of choice all day rather than a sudden spree at night. :P While the party isn’t raging at all hours (there’s a strictly enforced curfew on the islands), there’s also zero evidence of daily life outside of tourism at that end of Don Det. I’ve enjoyed being on Don Khon because it feels like we’re not really in a tourist village. There are three schools on our road, the locals still stop in to see each other and trade babies for childcare, and there was a religious festival the other night that felt more like a village fair. Life goes on relatively unchanged here.
Other than trying to hide in the shade or underwater during the afternoon hours, our days here have been spent cycling around the island to explore the many beautiful nooks and crannies – the suspension bridge with so many loose boards that the bottom of the bridge sometimes moves forward with you, the stunning cascades, the bamboo forests, the small villages with fishing nets hung out to dry, the lumps in the water that turn out to be water buffalo. We spent a couple of vey entertaining sessions swimming with local children, laughing as they rocketed into the air after being launched by backpackers keen to play, watching with bemused smiles as they used coconuts as “pool toys” and threw themselves into the rapids. I marvelled at how young some of our fellow swimmers were and noted that life on a river means there’s always a shallow end and always time to learn how to swim.
As a means of passing the time, we paid $5 each to rent a tube and have a boat take us several kilometres upstream. We spent two and a half lovely hours floating back to our starting point. Once I put the stories of 2 metre long, 300kg Mekong catfish out of my mind, it was a great deal of fun! Rich got stranded in the submerged branches of a tree and then had a child push him off the rocks he beached himself on. :) Half-submerged in the (sometimes slightly scummy) river, it was the most comfortable we’ve been since we got here.
We’ve also spent several hours over various meals (easy to do when food can take up to an hour and a half to arrive) chatting with a German couple – “Hamburgers”, even – who came over to the island with us. Manfred and Kit are a couple of “golden backpackers” – he retired a year early, she’s on a year’s sabbatical – who are really doing it all this year. New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Galapagos… Their list is long (15 countries!) and inspiring, and their travel stories and approach to life are hysterical. I haven’t met many Germans who so easily make fun of their own cultural eccentricities and who deal with taboos so quickly; Manfred made a “all Germans are Nazis”-type comment in the first five minutes and I was so surprised that there was nothing left to do but burst out laughing.
Our next stop is Tat Lo (or Tatlo, Tadlo, or Tadlow, depending on what sign you read), where I’m looking forward to spending time around waterfalls and rural villages.
Grateful for: water, interesting travel friends
