A quiet New Year - Khong Island

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Since the holiday is all over, I’d better write one more piece, in case you think I’ve gone AWOL in Laos!

This will just be a brief summing up, so here goes.

From the last entry, you’ll see that we had a really early start on New Years Eve with a flight from Vientiane to Pakse. That was followed by a long day on the road, heading towards our next hotel in Don Khong, the largest inhabited island in the Mekong (at least, in the Laos area of Mekong). By 4 p.m. we were getting close, but then it got interesting. There’s no bridge to the island, so the local entrepreneurs have set up a system of home made ferries. I’m not kidding: this is agricultural engineering at it’s best. The most basic ferries consist of a couple of long boats side-by-side catamaran style, with a few planks nailed across the top. That gives enough room for a couple of motorbikes plus 3 or 4 people who might pay the equivalent of 40p to cross. The bigger ones are slightly more ambitious but follow the same lines: maybe there’s room for 5 or 6 vehicles plus 20 people on the “deck”. There’s no proper loading dock or pier: the driver just grounds the boat on the muddy river bank and his helpers put together a ramp using a few planks and blocks of wood. If they get greedy and cram too much on board, then the ferry will probably be stuck as it tries to leave, so last one aboard probably has to get off and wait for the next one. It’s a brilliantly effective system – it will be a sad day when they either build a bridge or the Chinese arrive with some super efficient slick motor boat. After the excitement, we reached the hotel at about 5:30, just after sunset. Perfect timing really – the boats can’t operate in the dark!

The hotel was arranged in a number of small blocks with about 6 rooms per block, on 2 levels. It seemed fairly busy, with a number of Thai party animals who are now apparently allowed to drink at New Year in their own country, so instead they hop on board the express bus and cross the border to get hammered in Laos! We wandered off along the riverside path by torchlight to the nearby village for dinner and a few beers. By 10 p.m. everyone was nodding off, so despite feeling guilty about not seeing in the New Year and some half hearted protests from one corner, we gave up the struggle to stay awake and headed back to the hotel. The Thai karaoke session was very subdued and kept me awake for no more than 10 minutes. So, for the first time in ages, I didn’t see the New Year in – one of the perils of our small group size…….

We did manage to wring an extra 30 minute lie-in from Phonsy, leaving by boat next morning at 8:30 for a ride on the Mekong. The whole day was a succession of boat, walk, boat, bus, boat……….until I gave up trying to figure out what came next. One interesting sight was the old railway engine, used by the French to transport timber across the island before shipping it back to France. The last part of the day was spent on a tiny boat, on the river, looking for freshwater dolphins. This is the sort of occasion where tour companies never promise anything. Tigers, whales, wild elephants, leopards, I’ve searched for them all without success. This time, as we sailed into a quiet backwater and cut the engine, there were two dolphins no more than 30 feet from the boat. They don’t leap out of the water so you can only see a fin or the curve of their body but it’s quite unmistakeable. After 5 minutes they moved further away and although we changed our position we didn’t get close again.

I almost forgot – we saw at least three waterfalls as well!

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