Si Phan Don and the sleepy south
Trip Start
May 12, 2005
1
20
33
Trip End
Sep 11, 2005
Don Det,
Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Monday, June 27, 2005
After a short boat trip across to one of the islands, Don Det, I headed for the "sunset" side of the island and found a lovely place to stay: a little wooden thatched bungalow (with just enough room for a bed and mosquito net) set in the garden of a restaurant on a terrace overlooking the river. Lunch was gorgeous fresh spring rolls, with a sweet chilli dipping sauce - one of my favourite foods from Laos/Vietnam.
I spent the afternoon exploring Don Det and the neighbouring island, Don Khon, which are linked by an old railway bridge, built by the French: the islands were an important supply route when Laos was a French colony, thus meriting the only couple of km of track ever laid in Laos! The rails are long gone now, but I spotted them shoring up several of the footbridges around the islands.
On Don Khon, I hired a bicycle for a couple of hours and cycled to a waterfall and a small beach.
I ate at my guesthouse, watching the sunset (which was pretty, but not spectacular), then went in search of a phone to call Andrea, as it was her birthday. I didn't manage to find one, but I did spot the Israeli guy, who introduced me to a couple of people, including an English girl called Michelle. However, later on, I noticed that I had signal on my mobile and spent an absolute fortune talking to my little sister, then my mum!
The next day I spent the morning reading my book in the hammock outside my bungalow, then took a boat and sawngthaew trip to the biggest waterfall in SE Asia (1.5km long), which was in full - and powerful - flow: there has been quite a bit of rain over the past few days. We were then taken dolphin-spotting: Si Phan Don is one of the places that the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin hangs out and there was a dolphin-watching spot very close to the Cambodian border.
We did see dolphins - at least half a dozen of them - but they were disappointingly far away and impossible to capture on camera. I ended up deleting lots of photos of the splash just after a dolphin had disappeared. But we were actually quite lucky to see any - there are only a couple of hundred left in the world, half of which live in the Laos/Cambodia stretches of the Mekong.
After seeing the dolphins, we got back to the border post to find our driver drinking Beer Lao with the immigration control police and they were most insistent that we - a group of seven foreign girls - should join them in several rounds of beer, which just kept on 'appearing' each time we thought that we had drunk enough to be polite... They were very funny, though.
The sun was setting as we got back to Don Det and I rounded off the evening with good food at a Lao "Rasta" cafe on the island and aother bottle of Beer Lao back on the terrace at my guesthouse.
Cathy
