Laos, part 1...

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So, we made it to Laos! After an early morning from Kratie we got to the border crossing to Laos in the middle of nowhere, it was a walkover crossing so the bus dropped us off on the Cambodia side, we went through and got our passports stamped and paid our 1$ in ‘stamp fees’, then walked across ‘no mans land’ which was quite cool, no longer in Cambodia and not yet in Laos… but we got to the Laos side soon enough and paid another 2$ in ‘entrance fees’ and got picked up. The bus to Don Diet (one of the four thousand islands in S. Loas) didn’t take long to get to where the boat stops though we had to wait for half an hour for our boat. Climbing on the boat was an interesting task, we had teamed up with 2 other English girls by this point both with equally heavy bags, and we were in severe danger of sinking the skinny ‘long boat’. The Laos people on the boat thought we were hilarious, staggering on and nearly falling into the water…

Don Diet was incredibly chilled, and beautiful!! There is electricity between 7pm and 10pm, the huts are little bungalows on stilts above the Mekong, basically in someone’s front yard and they have hammocks hanging in front of them over the river. So we didn’t really move from our hammocks for the rest of the afternoon, it was raining, especially Izzy who decided to try a ‘lao lao’ shake at lunch which turned out to be a kind of rice wine/whiskey concoction, so she slept for several hours… In the evening we got our meal at the guesthouse and decided to wander, in the dark. We didn’t get very far before we realized, not much of a night scene on Don Diet, hadn’t yet seen another tourist except the 2 girls we crossed with. Early to bed, and early to rise.
Next day we cycled around the stunning island for most of the day burning off our beer Laos’ past rice paddies and people working hard and the river and on to Don Khon to see the waterfall, biggest waterfall in SE Asia by volume, which was very impressive. We couldn’t get over how quiet and how green the island was! That night was a preeeetttty sunset, of which i took way too many pictures, obviously.

Next day we had to leave, could have spent a while longer in the most chilled out place I think I have ever been to, but we had a nightbus to Vientiane. So we got the boat back across, and the bus to Pakse, where we had a four hour wait. Which was definitely enough, sleepy Laos is fine when there are hammocks and bikes and river but in a not very pretty town… we filled our time effectively though by having some more beer Laos 😊

Met some very over excited English guys on the sleeping bus, in the year below and waiting for their a level results, we were obviously full of all the wise wisdom no one waiting for results wants to hear ‘you’ll be fiiine’ ‘if we can do it so can you’ and the like…

Vientiane was a bit of a let down in excitement levels, but then what do you expect in Laos. We got a tuk-tuk, not really knowing where to go we declared that we wanted to go to the ‘centre’. He dropped us in a quiet looking street, we reckoned we had probably been ripped off and it was our own fault for not asking for a specific place, but on consultation with the Lonely Planet, we, in fact, were in the centre. After a bit of trouble finding our guest house, and sampling some free breakfast, we went for an explore.

Ok my time is about to run out so I better dash, more soon xxx

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