Pakse & the 4000 islands 11/11/11 - 17/11/11

As we leave Savannakhet groups of women are waving an array of food on sticks up to our windows - splayed BBQ chicken, crickets, boiled eggs (yes, on sticks!), and bags of sticky rice all festering in the blazing heat. A bus journey made irritating by screeching boys and annoying ring-tones ends by being dumped at the side of the road (again) in Pakse where we get harangued by touts offering "Taxi" in "Pakse". We find accommodation at "Tha Luang" - a motel style complex with layabout staff and a room that smells like a chain-smokers sweaty armpit.

A breakfast sandwich from a café whose interior resembled a motor workshop unsurprisingly ended with dodgy guts, which was not desirable on an 8am tuktuk ride to the ferry pier for a 2 hour boat ride along the depressingly dirty Mekong to Champasak. We get collected by another tuktuk to drive us to the magnificent Khmer ruins of Wat Phou. It's baking hot as we walk up the steep narrow steps to the pre-Angkor temple for great views over the valley. It's a peaceful place, with crumbling old ruins that whet our appetite for Angkor Wat in a week's time.

After a lunch of fried rice, spring rolls and banana flambéed in laolao (local rice whiskey) we're back in the boat to Pakse. Locals bathe in the dirty waters, kids play and swim from moored boats, some fish with nets, smiling and waving as we float past. Others look on curious, waste pipes from the riverside houses on stilts feed straight into the river. Meanwhile nearer the main town, huge and grand hotels are being built overlooking the water.

The next day we travel via minibus and boat to Don Khong Island where we find accommodation at "Hostel Souksan" - a nice smart bedroom with fan and a shower room large enough for us not to have to shower with one leg in the toilet like some other places.

We hire bikes and cycle along out of Muang Khong with the intention of finding Wat Phu Khao Kaew. Sparse open flat fields of farmland and rice fields littered with bamboo huts on stilts. Blazing hot sun - pass by the hills in the centre of the island on our right, water buffalo taking a bath, kids pass by with a cheerful "sabaidee", we smile and wave back, returning the greeting. People are mostly lolling about in the shade beneath their houses, some are in the fields, some doing general chores. We reach the far side of the island and bear right - but see no sign of the temple or any indication of where it might be. We plough on - legs are getting tired by now. We pass by a few basic shops and those odd petrol pump sheds. Reach a temple Ban Houa Khong and stop there for a surprise lunch we'd picked up at the bike rental place. Bundles of banana leaf with something inside which the non English speaking lady could not tell us about. We unwrap the many layers like a pass the parcel game to reveal a small dollop of pink grey mush which doesn't smell too bad, but with my already dodgy guts I'm not willing to take the risk so end up giving it to some local kids playing nearby. Their eyes light up and they scamper off to enjoy the treat. I hope it doesn't make them sick……

The hot sun is wearing us both down as we navigate the north of the island on our way back to the hostel. The ride is made more enjoyable by the kids on either side of the road waving, smiling and shouting "Sabaidee!" as we cycle past - or "Hello!" or "Falang, falang! Hello!" in the only English words they know. Others we pass by just look and stare in curiosity, boredom or resentment? If you say "Sabaidee" to them, more often than not their sullen faces break out into a wide grin. Others youngsters cycle past us and we exchange 'High 5's' and some run by our sides for a while. Otherwise there's not much to see on this side of the island, the road is closed in on either side by dense bushes.

The next day starts with an hour and half slow put-put boat to Don Deth island. We walk south down the right side of the island to find "Mr Pho's" guest house - a wooden hut on stilts, very basic with a fan, private shower and scoop toilet and hammocks outside.

We're 30 mins away from the main strip of bars and eateries down a dirt track littered with obstacles ranging from rickety bridges to scorpions to protruding tree roots, which when trying to navigate through patches of pitch black darkness gets quite awkward…. Had local Lao speciality for dinner which I'd pre-ordered - catfish steamed in banana leaf which looks like a lump of moulded grey goo, but tastes pretty good with flavours of basil and lemongrass and served with the now obligatory sticky rice in a small bamboo pot. Back to Mr Pho's and we're welcomed by cockroaches scurrying on the floor.

Wake to c*** crowing (they're everywhere in Laos), a strange grunting/mooing noise and the gong from a temple nearby. As we're on the "sunrise" side of the island I get up to watch said sunrise a little before 6am. The horizon over the Mekong is lit by a swathe of firey red swirling into purples before paling off to blue above. The swirls shift in pattern and intensity until 10 mins later the shimmering ball of light appears.

After Mr Pho attempted to blatantly rip us off last night we had checked out some other prices and decide to change hostel, so today we check in to a nicer place for half the price. It has lino flooring and not as much opportunity for bugs to find their way in and freak out Katy and cause her to wake in the middle of the night imagining all kinds of insect horrors are with us in the mosquito net.

Don Deth is described as "backpacker haven" - a term we've come to realise means something like "perfectly idyllic landscape ruined by obnoxious westerners getting wasted" - though this place isn't as bad as Vang Vieng. It's an odd clash of bars, family homes and guesthouses. Most of these have a "restaurant" which is not more than a timber framed decked area with some cheap plastic chairs, or for the more upmarket, wooden seats with cushions. Some look vaguely more hygienic and respectable than others, all have an array of condiments, some have table cloths (that are normally dirty), some have laminated menus and others have scrappy hand-painted wooden boards.

At the northern end of the island by the pier and the "beach" are a cluster of tourist oriented bars but away from them for the most part it's quiet - the silence only broken by bird chatter, cockerels crowing, cows mooing and the outboard engines of passing boats transporting either locals, supplies or tourists up and down the river. There is a monkey near "Don Deth restaurant" which makes for a sad sight as it looks longingly into the distance and makes kamikaze style leaps from the tree only to be yanked back by the chain that it's tied to. The people are generally friendly but have no concept of customer service, so eating out is hostile at best. Everyone appears fit and we've rarely seen an overweight Lao. They get up at dawn to prepare the restaurant for breakfast service, collect chillies, leaves and eggplants from the bushes in their garden, mill rice with a grinding machine powered by a foot-pedal, or row frantically against the river tide to get upstream. They're all very active, until the midday heat grinds everything to a halt and then they can be found lolling in hammocks underneath their houses in the shade.

The dogs are mangy sad looking things with flea-bitten fur and protruding ribs. There is a gang of them who seem to reside underneath our room - growling, snarling and gnashing wildly at each other like creatures possessed. The litter that appears to be prevalent everywhere in Laos is still sadly noticeable with empty water bottles, beer Lao bottles etc just discarded by the wayside. There are huge dark winged butterflies flitting about the neatly trimmed hedgerows in the courtyard of our guesthouse

Then the net book died…..our mood plummets. Suddenly we're very fed up of this place - the dirt, the snotty rude and slow restaurant staff, everyone's sullen looks….

We took a cycle ride the next day on hired bikes to Don Khone - the island directly south of Don Deth. The sun beat down from high overhead when we started just before midday along the deep muddy rutted path that we've stumbled along so many times before we turned inland and followed the road past desolate rice fields until we met the French constructed stony bridge and paid the 2000 kip to get to the other side. We cycled past the rusty old steam locomotive and on to Lhi Phi falls which were more a series of rapids crashing over huge boulders - they were neither pretty nor spectacular. We paused for a while amongst the stalls selling various tourist trinkets and tried our first fresh coconut drink - a whole coconut (which is smooth and green and not the furry brown things we know from home) served with a straw through the top and when the water inside is finished they cut the thing open so you can eat the flesh inside. Again - not as nice as expected.

We follow some signs down a bumpy stony shaded slope to reach a nice secluded beach with only a bamboo hut selling refreshments, some stranded long rowing boats and a man running around in circles. We walked along the hot sand to paddle our feet in the relatively nice part of the Mekong river, but didn't stop for long.

After helping another tourist with a broken bike chain we explored the riverfront area of bars and restaurants which appear to be more civilised than our island and not quite as "touristy". Soon the businesses diminish to be replaced by schools, doctors and family homes mostly in wooden huts, with one or two random French colonial style brick houses standing deserted in-between. Palm trees tower over a rutted path that leads to open rural farmland with the Mekong river flowing past on the left and cows, pigs and water buffalo idly grunting on the right, grazing in or near rice fields which have conical hats bobbing above the crops. There doesn't seem to be many people about - either tourists or locals. The path is now reduced to a worn path no more than the width of a bike tyre. We have no idea if we're going the right way, but we plough on regardless through the peace and quiet of this perfect picture of rural South East Asia.

A while later though the path takes a turn for the worse and we are soon bumping and jolting along a path riddled with large stones whilst the bushes are crowding around us. Every so often through a break in the thick foliage, we can catch a glimpse of the river still on our left or an abandoned stilt bamboo structure - whilst around us we can hear big rustling sounds in the undergrowth. Along narrow wooden bridges we ride, praying that they will bear our weight and come across the remotest settlements we've yet seen - a couple of rickety huts in a clearing with the dense jungle all around them and just a single track road running between them. Kids race out shouting "Sabaidee!" and pointing at the baskets on the front of our bikes and repeating what sounds like "penpenpenpen"- Katy and I have different stuff in our baskets so we're not sure what they're after? From out of nowhere an old woman appears and waves at us and pointing towards the house garbling some thing unintelligible as her toothless mouth is filled with a thick reddish mush which to our slightly wired minds looks something a lot like raw blood…..

We leave this bizarre scene and eventually find a more obvious "road" that is full of loose stones making for an arduous bumpy long route back to Don Deth where we meet streams of young school kids wearing white shirts with a red scarf and black trousers or skirts with an embroidered hem walking or cycling along the dusty dirt path.

The next day we get up early to leave this strange little haven and catch the boat to our onward connection to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

Dean x