Four thousand islands

The Si Phan Don area in Southern Laos is where the Mekong is at it’s widest and home to an archipelago of sandbars and rocky islets – the four thousand islands. The guidebook waxed lyrical about this area describing how the islands were set amongst the turquoise expanse of the Mekong where at night the river is dotted with the lights of fishing boats, while during the wet season, the lush palm studded islands are alight with fireflies and there’s a steady flow of long tail boats gliding past bathing water buffalo. Sounds pretty great n’est ce pas? Well I should have trusted my instincts as I did wonder how the Mekong that we knew, brown and turgid, could turn into the turquoise expanse that the Lonely Planet was harping on about. Turns out it can’t. Actually, that’s a lie, it can, but only for a short time in February. Huh.

Fortunately for us, at the airport in Pakse we bumped into a German couple who had been on our boat from Nong Khiaw. This time we all introduced ourselves and it turned out that Doro and Mathias were also heading for Si Phan Don. We grabbed a taxi with them to the bus terminal in Pakse where we were loaded into an open sided lorry along with bags of rice, suitcases, boxes, far more people than safe, oh yes, and a moped, for the 3 hour trip further south.

Our new friends were equally as disillusioned as we were with Don Khong where we ended up, so after checking in to a guest house we resolved to book the one day tour of the area for the following day and then got merrily drunk at a riverside bar. 17 large beers later at the ungodly hour of 11pm (yes, 11pm!!) we were politely asked to leave as lights were turned out around us. I blame the German influence for this behaviour (hi Doro and Mops!).

The tour the next day was a little mixed – it was interesting to be out on the boat in amongst the islands, put-put-putting along in our wooden boat and slowing down even further into the island rhythm. We went to see a couple of waterfalls, the second of which is apparently the largest one in SE Asia by volume but was a bit of a disappointment. We did however manage to tick yet another endangered species off our list as we went to see the very rare fresh water Irrawaddy dolphin right on the border with Cambodia. There are only 5 pods of these dolphins in the world and about 70 adults where we were. The locals revere the dolphins because they believe that they save them from crocodiles. This is good for the dolphins as it means that the otherwise omnivorous locals won’t eat them.

We finished the day with dinner back where we were staying and found ourselves at 9.20pm having to beg for kitchens to be reopened so that we could have a final beer and dessert. I’m pretty sure that the island was happy to see us leave!