3999 islands too go...

From Vang Vieng we got on a bus to Vientiane. "Never mind the five hours bus ride, we just have to get out of this crazy place... There are too many happy people here!" Mohan summarized it quite good there, and the five hours went by like nothing. Our hopes were to get on a bus that evening and continue south in Laos, and even if we did not complain, we had hoped the bus to Pakse did not leave 15 minutes after our arrival, at least so we could get some dinner before getting into the 15 hours of Laotian pop music. Mohan was going from here to Bangkok, Jared stayed behind in Vang Vieng to do a two day trek, so from now on it was just Paul and me. The bus was as usual full of boxes in the aisle, people on the boxes, and more or less on my lap, which was double it's normal size, due to the severe pressure that was put upon them as the guy in front of me reclined his seat back.
After waiting for one hour at the deserted Southern bus station in Pakse, we got in the back of a pickup-truck with benches. It took us two and a half hours to get to the drop off. We stopped every once in a while, and countless small girls came up to the car to sell us all kinds of food. We did not even know what it all was, but we did get to try some of the things that the locals tried. One of them was a bamboo cane that was filled with rice and coconut. It was quite tasty, though a little too sweet for my taste.
Our next transport was supposed to take us a few kilometers down to the river where we could catch a boat to the four thousand islands. With our big bags and the stiff prices we decided to walk it, and by now we had an Italian girl joining us for the day. After starting to walk, we hitched a ride with the tractors they use here. It is a big engine placed on top of two wheels, a long steering handle going back to the wagon attached to the wheels.
The boat took us out to the island of Don Dat. It is a beautiful island in the middle of the Mekong delta. The area is called four thousand islands in English, and that is not hard to understand. Although looking like paradise in almost all ways, the only downside is the heavy tourism (as everywhere else). On most of the island there are built bungalows along the shore, and the prices are artificially high. This turned out to be a little problem for us since there is no ATM on the island. We were short of money, and needed to save the USD we had for the Cambodian border. The only money we had was some Vietnamese Dong, but there were no exchanges that would take that. I spent over an hour trying to find someone going to Vietnam who could buy our Dong. Finally I made a deal with a Canadian guy, and had enough money for the bus ticket to Stung Trong, a small city on the Cambodian side of the border.
After rationing the money we had left for dinner, water and a small breakfast, we spent the rest of the day around our bungalow, swimming in the Mekong. The water was so warm that it was hard to cool down, but it was lovely. And in the sand along the banks in the middle of the river, there were shiny minerals in a magnitude I have never seen before. It was beautiful. We watched the sunset from the hammock on the bungalow terrace. The Swiss guy in the bungalow next to ours was playing relaxing songs on his guitar, and there was now a small breeze coming up from the river. The locals went out fishing, and we went to have dinner. There was not much money, but we found an Indian restaurant where we could get two plain rice and a small vegetarian dish each. On the table next to us were two British ladies we had med on the bus to Luang Prabang, and they felt so bad for us that they bought us a bottle of water and a beer, without telling us first. We thanked them, and knew that this would save us from a headache the next day. The food was good, although the large quantity of rice got a little boring, and mixed with the water it knocked Paul right out. We both went to bed in our bungalow around 9 PM, ready to wake up and get to Cambodia the next day.