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Published: March 24th 2016
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After a great time in Cambodia, the next country on our route was Laos. Our four hour journey over the border ended up taking over 12 hours as various different buses dropped us off in various different places to wait for hours, and we arrived in Si Phan Don exhausted at about 10pm. Fortunately, if there was ever a place to just kick back and relax, Si Phan Don is that place. The name translates as '4000 Islands', which is a very literal description of the place; it sits on a stretch of the Mekong where the river spreads out into a wide expanse of little tropical islands with ribbons of water between. Basically what you do there is jump in a hammock overlooking the water, open a cold beer, pick up a book and watch the world go by. Lovely!
We spent the first couple of nights on Don Det, the 'party island' (though it shuts down by about 11 pm), mainly because that was the island our boat arrived on and we felt too lazy to move the next day, and then moved on to the more chilled out surroundings of Don Khon. We ended up lingering for
five days there, unable to drag ourselves to the effort of moving; a great week of R&R. We did get out of the hammocks occasionally - walking down to see a couple of pretty impressive waterfalls, and generally wandering around the traditional village life on the island. We also had a couple of great afternoons tubing - we walked up a few kilometres with some bottles of beer then jumped in a tube and slowly floated back along the Mekong among the palm trees, water buffalo and local fishermen - perfect!
We caught the night bus up to the capital, Vientiane, after Si Phan Don - an interesting journey on a sleeper bus in a 'full-length bed' built for someone at least a foot shorter than I am. Near-constant cramp, breakneck speeds and pot-holed roads are not conducive to a good nights sleep - we'll be taking a normal bus next time! Not a lot to report from Vientiane, as we both got ill (again...) and spent the majority of our time there in bed / within striking distance of a bathroom. We recovered enough to visit the Buddha Park one day, which was a lot of fun -
a very tacky park of concrete Buddhist and Hindu statues; a huge reclining Buddha, characters from the Ramayana doing various unspeakable things to one another, a multi-faced Buddha head sat atop some kind of octopus body, and a giant pumpkin containing heaven, earth and hell within it, which you could climb up and survey the whole wonderful mess from the top of, among many other treasures. Bizarre, tacky and unique - my kind of temple.
Next up was Vang Vieng, former hedonistic backpacker capital of South-East Asia. It used to trade on tubing, where backpackers would float down the river and get pulled in to endless numbers of bars giving out free shots of Lao Lao (a rather nasty but very cheap Laotian moonshine), while swinging from rope swings, zip lining and sliding into the river. However, as numerous drunken idiots died on the river, the government clamped down on it and most of the bars closed down, along with all of the death trap swings and slides. We tubed there one day, and it's pretty sedate nowadays - a couple of bars on the riverbanks, but generally not a huge amount going on other than gently floating through
the countryside with a couple of beers. Vang Vieng itself isn't that nice - lines of crappy restaurants with identical Western menus, every single one of them showing Friends on TV - but the scenery around the town is gorgeous; limestone karst mountains, rice paddies and caves. We wandered out to a cave one morning, which has a beautiful clear blue river running below it, and had fun splashing about in the deep pool there for an hour or so before giving the cave a cursory glance and wandering back again.
After Vang Vieng we had one of the highlights of our trip so far - a couple of days learning to ride motorbikes in Kasi. Throughout South-East Asia we've seen huge numbers of backpackers with nasty injuries all up one side of their bodies as a result of a motorbike crash, as loads of people rent bikes without actually knowing how to ride. Not being entirely stupid (normally), we hence haven't rented motorbikes thus far. In Kasi though, a Welsh guy called Tom has set up a little motorbike school, Uncle Tom's, and it's brilliant. We spent a couple of hours learning the basics in his yard and
on a big flat field nearby, then headed out to bike through the stunning mountain scenery, while Tom kept us entertained with local information and silly jokes through headsets. We shared a few beers that evening - enough even to compete with the locals in a bit of karaoke by the end of the night - and got up the next day eager to get back on the bikes. The second day was a ride on dirt roads through more fantastic rural Laotian countryside, getting covered in dust (including the inside of our throats, noses and lungs...) and loving every single second of it. Far too soon an awesome couple of days were over and we jumped on a bus through yet more incredible scenery up to Luang Prabang.
Luang Prabang was our final stop in Laos, where Tania's dad Felix and his friend Roland came out to meet us to get a taste of backpacking in Laos and Thailand for a couple of weeks. What a lovely place Luang Prabang is - a UNESCO World Heritage site, the city planning laws tightly control any building work to retain the huge charm of the place. A blend of Chinese-influenced
buildings with French colonial grandeur and dozens of spectacular temples, just wandering through the streets is a treat. We had fun introducing Felix and Roland to all the great food and visiting some temples with them, and - of course - having a few beers watching the sun set over the Mekong. On one day we visited a traditional weaving place, which was surprisingly fascinating - the looms are immensely complex considering it's millennia old technology, and the weavers are amazingly skilful. A particularly intricate patterned fabric can take a full 6 months or more to weave - those kinds of handicrafts have always seemed way over-priced when we've seen them in markets, but now they seem like a pretty good deal!
A pretty quick trip through Laos in the end - another fantastic country, and we wish we could have seen more of it. Back across the border again now to explore the north of Thailand.
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