Filling my pants

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Si Phan Don is a landlocked archipelago in the Mekong, just above the Laos border with Cambodia. Its name means 4,000 Islands, a notional rather than strictly accurate indication of the profusion of sandbanks, islets, and full-blown islands in the area. Reaching it was a tedious process.

The guesthouse in Pakxe tried to tell us there were no seats available on the minibus, even though we'd booked them. Then we had to pay extra for a boat trip to our island of choice that should have been included in the original ticket price. And then the skipper appeared to be inexperienced at navigating the river, resulting in us running aground several times.

Don Khong is the main backpacker haven, but we'd opted for Don Khon (yes, just a g of difference) instead, hoping for more tranquility and fewer drunken teenagers floating around in tires. The tranquility was certainly there, as was a lazy stretch of the Mekong and many palm trees and rice fields.

Unfortunately it wasn't a great location for someone as averse to heat as myself. With electricity being super-expensive here, guesthouses only run their generators between 6PM and 10PM, meaning for the majority of the day there's no power to turn the fan (don't even think about A/C). I spent the 3 days there in a soggy mess, showering every couple of hours in an attempt to keep cool. The guesthouse would turn on the generator briefly if the restaurant needed it to, say, make a fruit shake, and you know the heat is getting to you when you seriously consider ordering shakes every 5 minutes during the day just to be able to power the fan. It didn't help that the area was infested with bugs of every description, from praying mantises to flies to mossies to small biting flies that were minute enough to fit through the mossie net mesh and wreaked havoc on many areas of my body.

One plus point was that I had my first ever go in a hammock, which has now been added to the list of must-haves in my future house.

There's nothing much to do on Don Khon except relax. You can wander over a bridge to Don Det in order to see some waterfalls, and you can plod along a highly uneven path to the south end of Don Khon to see Cambodia across the widening Mekong. Freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins can sometimes be seen here at the end of the dry season.

To add to my discomfort, I developed an unpleasant stomach upset that periodically sent me rushing to the toilet to fight with the forces of evil. I spent an entire day in bed as I was too weak to go anywhere and needed to be in range of a loo. That evening, as we were sitting in the restaurant and I was hoping to put a few spoons of rice in my stomach, the 20 second warning came. Unfortunately I was caught short in the worst way possible. Suffice to say that I had to bid farewell to a pair of Jockeys and my favourite shorts, and spent 20 minutes on a nasty clean-up operation. It's impossible to put into words my thoughts at that precise moment.

I do not have fond memories of Don Khon.

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