Advertisement
Published: November 9th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Women harvesting rice
The hats are for real, not for the tourists! Our next destination was to the four thousand islands, right at the bottom of Laos, where the Mekong fans out. There are actually only 3 islands you can choose from, Don Khong, the flash one (it has electricity), Don Det, the backpackery one, and Don Khon, the very quiet one. We had 6 days before our visas expired so we went to Don Det, intending to head to Don Khon after a few nights, depending how we liked it. As it turned out, we loved Don Det and stayed there the whole time as we couldn't imagine anything better!
Don Det was so gorgeous and not loud atall. Infact, it was incredibly quiet. You get a longtail boat over the walk about trying to pick somewhere to stay. You can choose between sunrise or sunset side. We went sunset, imagining the horror of the sun blaring in on us at 6am. There are tonnes and tonns of wood/rattan huts along the riverside, but essentially it's still a local place, just with lots of white guys wandering about. Everyone lives in those village style houses with thair cows, chickens, pigs and water buffalo. You see the women in the fields harvesting
the rice and the men threshing the crops by hand. People wash their kids and their clothes in the river. It is very lovely and peaceful indeed. Plus, there is no electricity. Some people have generators that go till about 10pm. The place we chose to stay (for a whopping 15,000 kip, or 1 pound) didn't, so after 5.30pm it was total darkness on our balcony,over the river. And there was no-one else staying there so we had the place to ourselves. We sat in the hammocks and lit candles.
There's absolutely nothing to do on Don Det, that's the attraction. We tended to wake up early, because all the locals get up early and as rattan walls are paper thin you can hear all the goings on from dawn. But then we'd just sit in our hammocks, read books, watch the longtail boats come and go and when the need arose we would wander into 'town'(dont get the wrong idea, no concrete in sight, not even on the floor) for something to eat. It's amazingly easy to spend a few days doing exactly nothing. One afternoon we went for a dip in the river where we had seen
the village kids playing, so figured it must be ok (despite our sighting of a water snake the previous day!!). While we were there the kids arrived back from school and came down for a swim. They looked at us with some suspicion - 2 large white grownups in their playground? - then figured we were ok and striped off and jumped in after us! They were very sweet - the boys were all taking turns to jump in and made sure Mike always took his turn. They enjoyed the big splashes he could make.
So although Don Det was marvelous, there's not much more to say because we didn't do anything! We celebrated our 5th 'anniversary' with a cheap bottle of wine and a sit on the balcony.
We would definately reccomend Laos to everyone, what a great place. Even though it's a bit hard to get to, it's a great place to spend a couple weeks or more if you have it!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.04s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 18; dbt: 0.0186s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1mb
Mum & Dad
non-member comment
chilled
We feel chilled out just reading the blog.