4000 Islands

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Got the nightbus to Pakse from Vientiane last night, it took about 10 hours but I reckon i slept through most of it, so it was ok. We arrived at Pakse at 6am, feeling and looking pretty rough: We were greeted by tons of tuk tuk drivers offering to drive us everywhere- we managed to fend them off so we could get our bearings.

We decided to leave Pakse straight away and catch a "bus" to the 4000 Islands (as the name suggests, these are simply loads of Islands that lie in the South of Laos in the Mekong river) The journey from Pakse to the Islands was quite an experience, we were in a truck typed thing that could hold about 10 people, but we managed to get 32 passengers on it (About five of them just hanging onto the back). At every village we passed through we were ambushed by villagers offering to sell us all sorts of random food- i thought i'd give it a miss.

After all the travelling we'd done since 8pm last night it was a relief to finally arrive at Si Khone, one of the islands, after a quick boat ride. We stayed in a beach hut by the Mekong with hammocks on the decking and all that jazz. It would have made sense to chill out and watch the world go by but instead we decided to hire out some bikes and explore the island and another island, Si Dan Det, which was connected to ours by a bridge.

The bike ride was pretty laid back until we decided to try and venture to the other side of our island to this place where you could see Dolphins. The road was unbelievably rocky, and it must have took us 40 minutes till it ended, in the heat it was getting pretty unbearable. We finally reached the other side of the island and got a boat to some rocks in the middle of the river where we saw some dolphins, they were about 50 metres away, the view of the Mekong as the sun set was awesome.

The bike ride back wasn't all that enjoyable! We had an early night, tomorow we hope to cros the border into Cambodia.

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Photos

About to get boat to our island
We'd been travelling for 16 hours by this stage

Dolphin Point
Will and J on the rocks

Comments

[Nita]

Good
Did you really see the Dolphin? Real one? Any photos to prove?