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4,000 Islands
Entry 6 of 22 | show all | print this entry |
For the past 5 days I have been in Laos (pronounced without the "s"
it's French spelling.)
I am currently in Pakse (pronounced Pak-say) and it is raining
buckets. It is supposed to be the rainy season, but it didn't start
really really raining until yesterday. It has been raining pretty
hard for 24 hours now.
After leaving Phnom Penh I went north to a town called Kratie
(pronounced Kra-chay). This was just a quick over night stop on the
way to Laos. However they have one tourist attraction - freshwater
dolphins. I went on a boat and we saw dozens of small gray
dolphins. They look more like a porpoise than the bottle nose
dolphin we think. They didn't jump out of the water too much, but
they made really cool noises when they came up for air.
Then I headed north again to Stung Treng. Even though it was a
small town it had some charm. I can say now after visiting 3
smaller towns in Cambodia, that they remind me a lot of South
American towns. When the French were there they built a lot of
buildings. Now, the buildings are run down and falling apart. They
have the same charm as Spanish colonial towns. There is the mixture
of french buildings, muddy streets, garbage and wooden/metal
shacks. It is almost the same mixture as the old Spanish towns.
The transportation here is very easy to come by, but rarely
comfortable. I went from Phnom Penh to Kratie in a bus sharing my
seat -normally meant for 2 people - with a grandma and her
grandson. Luckily they didn't have any chickens. Then from Kratie
to Stung Treng I took a car. They fit 7 people in the car - 4 in
the back, 2 in the front and 1 driver. Luckily he had a pillow for
me to sit on because I sat in between the driver and the passenger
on the emergency brake. From Stung Treng over the border I took a
super fast speedboat. The kid sitting next to me had his eyes
closed and his head tucked into his knees, because the wind hurt
with the speed we were going. Then in Lao they have something call a
two row. Which is a pick up truck with 2 planks of wood for seats -
creating the two rows of seats. Then then have a very colorful
metal covering over it all. Today there was 3 chickens (alive), 5
fish (dead), two huge bags of rice and 15 people all in the pick-up.
On Wednesday after crossing the border and taking another taxi and
boat, I arrived at my destination: Si Phon Dan or 4,000 islands.
There are thousands of small islands in the Mekong river. I found
myself a bungalow that could quite possibly be one of the best
values in the whole world. I had a wooden bungalow on stilts, with
a porch and a hammock over the edge of Mekong for a whopping
dollar! I thought they were joking when they told me the price. So
I swung on the hammock, read books, ate good food and watched the
sun set over the lush green hills for a total of $25 for 5 days.
The island is really calm as the center is all rice fields with
water buffalo roaming around. The coast line is all bungalows
looking over the water that is a dark brown color now because of the
rains. It makes a striking difference compared to the blue sky and
green rice fields. There were also a couple waterfalls in between
some islands. These islands also have freshwater dolphins but they
are almost black and larger.
I stayed on an island called Don Det. It has a whole bunch of these
bungalows and only 2 cars on the whole island. I woke up every
morning to the sound of roosters, not a problem because I went to
bed every night before 10pm because there wasn't electricity. So I
highly recommend to anyone with 1,100 dollars and needing some
relaxation time to hop on a plane - 900 to Bangkok and head down to
4000 islands to spend the left over 200 dollars laying in a
hammock. It is beautiful, chill and so cheap! If it wasn't so
difficult to reach I think many more people would be going. I think
the fastest you could get there from Bangkok would be 20 hours.
Today I am trying to get prepared to go to an ecoresort for a day
and then further up north. My original plans have to be modified
because they have closed the capital city to all tourists for a 10
days. And it just happens that all buses travel through the capital
to head north. They are closing it because there is a big
conference with all kinds of important people from Asia. They are
afraid of terrorism.
Hope the summer is going well for everyone else. Keep in touch,
Laura
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