Next morning and time for some more kayaking, we'd never done so many river activities before and was starting get a little tired of the Mekong so agreed that this would be the last one. After capsizing on our last outing in the kayak on route to Vientiane, we was told there will be a few mild rapids to look out for on this trip, so we thought we'd be kind I'd prepared having already gone over before. But nothing would have prepared us for what actually happened when we did inevitably capsize. About half hour in and we stopped to see the first waterfall, which by the standards of the other that we'd seen, it didn't rank any where near, then we hiked for around 20 minutes to another part of the river where our kayaks were. Back i. The kayaks and being told to go first through some quite dense shrubbery, where it was only wide enough for one kayak, the water started to pick up a lot more pace than usual, we was now going through a fairly quick rapid, trying our very best to keep ourselves as balanced and straight as possible, until we were swung around sideways, slung out of the kayak and capsized with each end of the kayak getting wedged on either side of the banks, blocking all of the other kayaks coming down. Coming out of the water from underneath the kayak, jeni was nowhere to be seen, then a few seconds later appeared only to be sucked under and popped out the other side, with the water only waist high, the current underneath was so strong she was shot down river. Shouting to her to "GRAB HOLD OF A BRANCH" she missed one then managed to get herself tangled in a plant in the water. By this time another two kayak's had already ploughed down, one somehow getting though and capsizing and one also getting impaled on the bank, so as I was trying frantically to untangle the kayak and trying to keep my balance in the current on the rocks below, the tour guide finally caught up and helped, telling us to just keep our feet up and let the current take us to safety which was just a little way further down. Luckily there were no injuries apart from a few scratches on my feet from the sharp rocks, and we retrieved our kayak from the guide. There was few grumbles from a few people in the group because we made them capsize but most people along with us saw the funny side, so with our confidence massively dented we paddled on. We arrived at the part of the river, after about 3 hours, where the dolphins can be spotted and we actually saw about 6 swimming around in the distance which was a first for us. Feeling really tired and still having another hour and a half to paddle, I was pretty much done with kayaking by now. We finally got to the drop off point and then had to haul our kayaks up a sand bank and on to the truck which was to be taking us to the other waterfall???
which is a while kilometre wide and is the largest of its kind in terms of water volume flowing through. Thinking that we was going to be driven home we learned that we actually had to kayak for a further 30 minutes back to Don Det as we were on the island of Don Khong.....?? and were no roads or bridges across. But it was well worth the final hurdle as we got to kayak into the sunset, something that we'd never down before, an absolute picture! There was obviously some sort of celebration happening on the island because when walking though town after breakfast, when we started the trip at 9am, all the locals, young and old, were having a party, drinking, dancing and singing karaoke all day long. We needed to book a ticket out of Laos and into Cambodia to Phnom Penh, so on returning from our kayaking trip decide to used the same operator, where the lady writing the ticket was clearing half cut from the party and told us that somebody in the village had just been married so everybody celebrates