and laos, the end is near

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we've nearly reached the end of our time in laos. very close to the border but we think we'll stay where we are for another 5 days or so. arrived early this morning in an area called si phan don which means 4000 islands (slightly less islands now it's the rainy season). we're on don det, a small island about 4km long and 2 km wide in the mekong river. we found a great bamboo hut on the riverside (you can actually swim underneath our house), there's no fan and no shower but for 75 cents a night and 3 hammocks on our porch you can't really complain. the island is far less touristy than anywhere we've been so far. there are no cars on the island because the dirt tracks are too small. most of the island is made up of paddy fields and grazing land for cattle. electricity only arrived on the island this year, we've none in our hut but we've just invested in a load of candles

we got a bus from vientiane last night which had bunk beds on it, even though we didn't get much sleep our muscles were in a much better state than if we had been travelling for 9 hours on a normal bus. had a really good time in vientiane. there's not alot to do there but what we did do was fun. we went to see patuxai, a kind of arc de triomphe type structure ,you can climb the stairs to the top to get a good view of the city, we also visited the laos history museum which deals mostly with the cambodians, the dutch, the french and the americans pissing the laos people off for the last few hundred years. The translations were intriguing - almost every piece of information gave mention to 'The U.S Imperialists and their puppets' - We found out later that day that laos is the most bombed country per capita in the world. alot of the cluster bombs that were dropped during the vietnam war never exploded and are still lying about in the forests in the north and the east of the country.

we really like it here, tomorrow we hope to rent bikes out and see the 2 islands (don det is conected to another island by a disused railway line built by the french, the only piece of railway line that they laid in the country actually) and finally get to do some tubing in the afternoon.

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