Laos - Don Det, Pakse, Vang Vieng, Luang Prabang

Don Det

We caught a bus from Siem Reap to Don Dhet, and we were lucky enough to find 2 seats next to one another. The people that got on after us weren’t as lucky, and we had a couple of people standing in the aisle and one man sitting on the stairs for a while, until someone got off the bus and they could have the empty seat. Unfortunately Steve had a dodgy stomach on that bus, so it wasn’t a very pleasant journey for him, but he managed to hold it together okay. The road between Cambodia and Loas wasn’t very good, and although part of it was tarred, it still felt as bumpy as a dirt road. After an otherwise uneventful journey we finally arrived at the Loas border. A guy came around on the bus (that worked for the bus company) and showed us a printout that said a UK passport would have to pay $40 for a Laos visa, which was about double what we were expecting to pay. However he swore blind that as it was an on arrival visa that required immediate processing, it did cost more. I’m still not sure whether to believe him. I reckon he probably paid $20 for the visa and pocketed the other half, but who’s to know. Everyone else on the bus handed over their passports , visa application forms and fees, and rather than bucking the trend, so did we. When we got to the border we didn’t even have to get off the bus, the guy just went inside, sorted out our visas and came back with them inside our passports. Then it was another hour on the bus before we reached the 4000 Islands stop.

We got off the bus in the middle of nowhere and transferred in to a small minivan, which drove us to a port. Actually we were pretty lucky to get in the minivan as the other guys were crammed in to an open backed sungthaw, with their luggage on the roof, and the last couple of brave aussies were on top of that. By this point it was pitch dark and the minivan took us down a little road to a port where we would get on a small boat to transfer across to the island of Don Det. We couldn’t get very much of a feel for where we had landed, as it was pitch dark, apart from a couple of lights on the edge of the river.

I might mention that we’d tried our best the day before to pre book some accommodation in Don Det. However as the online booking website that all the hostels shared wasn’t working, and the phone numbers listed in the guidebook were no longer in service, we had no choice but to arrive in the dark, and walk around with our luggage looking for somewhere to stay.

Steve had read up and found one place that was recommended by a number of travellers, so we asked the guy that was dropping us all off, which direction it was in, and off we raced with our backpacks, leaving the group behind. There is a definite sense of urgency / competition at these sorts of times, when a large number of people are dropped off in a new place, and you are all competing for the same rooms. Nobody really knows just how many rooms there are available, and whether everyone will be accommodated (also the nicest ones go first), so its every man / woman for themselves, and the faster you get cracking to find a room the better.

After asking for directions 2 more times, we managed to find it, and thankfully they did have a room available, although unfortunately not with a river view. The room was very basic, a wooden bungalow up on stilts with a mosquito net over the bed and a floor of wooden planks that you could see through to the ground through. There was also an old fan to stave off the sweltering heat. Oh and an ensuite bathroom (what luxury lol!) with a hand shower that only had 1 cold water tap, and a toilet (not a squat one so again what luxury) that you need to ’flush’ by pouring a jug of water down it from a big bucket! Rustic was not the word. After seeing the basic accommodation, I was wondering what in the world we had come to.

However the next morning when we got up and went to see the view of the river just a couple of doors down, we understood what all the fuss was about. The island is really beautiful and the views out and down the Mekong river are fantastic. We decided to hire a couple of bicycles, so that we could cycle around the island and we got as far as the old French bridge, where we crossed over to Don Khon island to go and see the waterfall there. Although it wasn’t a very tall one there was actually quite a lot of water moving through the crevice which was cool.

On our way to the bridge, we noticed that there were bungalows all the way along the river, although they all looked just as rustic as the place we were staying in. That night we headed back to the hostel for sunset over the river, which was really beautiful. Afterwards we went for dinner in a restaurant overlooking the river and got chatting to some people that were sitting next to us. We ended up spending the night with them, chatting and drinking which was fun. The next day we’d booked to go kayaking, and we did manage to get there for the 9h00 start. In fact, we can proudly say that we haven’t actually missed a plane / bus / train / tour that we’ve booked on the whole trip as yet.

The guide gave us a dry bag to transfer all our stuff in to, a helmet, a life jacket and a paddle and off we went to find our kayaks. Unfortunately our guide didn’t really speak any English (contrary to the advert for the tour I might add). At one point we tried asking ‘So what are we going to see next?’ which was met with a blank look, so we stopped trying to speak to ask questions, and just had a quiet day paddling along the river instead.

It did turn out to be a long day of paddling, and although it was downriver, the water was pretty low so there were long stretches without much current where we were paddling for ages and it was pretty exhausting stuff. Saying that the views were fantastic, and when we stopped for a packed lunch on a big rock in the middle of the river we got to see a number of Irrawaddy river dolphins swimming past us. I might mention that the packed lunch consisted of beef with fried rice in a styrophome container, that had been sweating in the guide’s drybag for a couple of hours ( you might be able to guess where this is going?).

After lunch on the rock it was back in the kayaks, with the sun beating down on us for a bit more paddling punishment, although we were rewarded with a stop at a big waterfall (most volume of water in South East Asia), before they loaded the kayaks in to the back of a sungthaw and started us on the drive back. However we didn’t actually drive all the way back to Don Det as I’d thought we would, the guide had one final surprise in store for us. We were actually dropped off on the far side of the river, so we had to do one final paddle to get ourselves back to Don Det (groan). I have decided that a full days kayaking is not really for me - its somewhat beyond my fitness levels and the novelty wears off around the time your shoulders start to ache and the blister on your thumb starts to set in. Saying that we had some beautiful views and I’m glad we got to see the dolphins.

That night we were pretty exhausted from all the paddling, and tried to get an early night. However following the sweaty beef I’d dared eat for lunch, it was my turn to get food poisoning and I was up all night throwing up - yuck. We did decide to stay an extra day on Don Det, before getting the bus on to Pakse, as it was very quiet and relaxing after the madness of Siem Reap and felt like more of a hidden backpacker destination than a lot of the places we‘d visited. We spent the extra day pretty much lying in a hammock, then eating, followed by some lying around at a low end table with those typically South East Asian triangular floor cushions. We did manage a brief swim in the Mekong in the afternoon which was refreshing in the sweltering heat before returning to the low end table where we met an English couple on a RTW trip and sat chatting to them.

The next day we queued up to get the small boat over to the mainland, and we only just managed to get the first boat out before it filled up. Then we were virtually dumped on the other side of the river to walk ourselves up the hill with our backpacks and find the bus. We managed to find a queue of people sitting outside a shop and showed a man our bus tickets, but he just shook his head and walked away (not to helpful then). We asked another man and he pointed us back down the road we had just come from. Organised chaos!

Eventually we found the right shop we should have been waiting at, and then after an hour or so of sitting around in the sun (Laos time) on the side of the road, a small minivan arrived. After he‘d loaded all the people for the other destinations, he asked the Pakse people to fill up the remaining space. So we climbed in to the back of the minivan, and the guy in front of Steve folded his little seat back down, so that it leaned against his legs (oh dear). About 2.5 hours later (only half an hour late result) we arrived at Pakse and were once again dumped outside a travel agency, with the bus speeding away. So we went inside and asked them to point out exactly where we where on the map in our guidebook. We managed to walk and found a hostel (one of the few times we hadn’t pre booked as there weren’t any hostels on the web). The first hostel we went to that was recommended in the book was fully booked, but the second one we found had space so we were relieved to put our bags down rather than walking around in the heat. I must say I much prefer to have a hostel booked and go straight to it, than wander around the streets carrying all your bags in the heat.

We only had one night in Pakse to break the journey to the capital city of Vientiane, as we didn’t fancy the 6 hour wait in Pakse on the ‘direct’ bus service. There wasn’t really very much to do in Pakse, so the following evening we caught the night bus to Vientiane. It was a sleeper bus and our first and only one in Laos. It was a little different to the sleeper buses we’d taken in South America, in that a ‘double’ bed wasn’t really wide enough for the two of us to lie down shoulder to shoulder, so one of us had to lie on our side to fit in. Thank goodness we weren’t on a ‘double’ sharing with a local stranger as that would have been awful. Apparently they do fill up the bunks, whether you know one another or not. We ran in to an aussie girl that we had met on Don Det, as she was on the same bus (bunk across the aisle) so we caught up with her a bit before settling in. We were pretty much in bed with the covers pulled up by 20h30 as it turned out there were no overhead lights on the bus, so you couldn’t read or play cards. So once we’d run out of conversation it was bed time. The bus did have air con and a nasty little toilet (I suppose better than none) along with a kind of bus hostess that handed out water, juice and biscuits (which we were very surprised with). Despite the cramped accommodation we did manage to get a little bit of sleep before the bus pulled in to Vientiane at 07h00 (only 1 hour late, not too bad). We had booked for one night in a cheap hotel (the guest houses weren’t on the hostel websites again) so we had something to go to. But basically everyone got off the bus, picked up their bags and then transferred over to a sungthaw, which then took us to the centre of town for $2 each. Well they said 15,000 kip each before we got in, and then when we got out and gave them a 50,000 kip note the guy tried to short change us with a 10,000 note for change. We noticed they were trying to extort more money out of nearly every passenger that got off the truck regardless of how much had been agreed upfront.

Then we walked the wrong way for about half an hour, until we eventually got our bearings and made our way to the cheap hotel we‘d booked. It wasn’t too bad, apart from the smell of damp and all the mosquitos (lol) but it turned out to be quite expensive compared with many of the guest houses in the area. So we went looking for a guest house that had a room available for our second night and prepaid so they would keep us a room. Vientiane turned out to be really busy with most of the guest houses fully booked (despite the fact that hardly any have pre booking on the internet). So we had 2 days in Vientiane and I’d like to say that we did something really touristy and went to see their temples etc, but we were a bit templed out, so we tried to get tickets for a local traditional dance performance, but that theatre had closed down (cant have been very good then) so we never did see that. Instead we went for a walk along the new riverfront promenade they are building and later on we tried some street food. This was the first time we were brave enough to have some genuine street food, where they actually cook on the streets, and you sit at little tables on the pavement in the middle of nowhere. I had the thai beef noodle which was very tasty (no resulting stomach sickness either) and Steve had the chicken cashew which was good as well. Its amazing that they can actually cook there in the middle of nowhere, and they even had electric lights hanging from poles above our tables! After dinner we went for a walk along the night market that mysteriously shoots up along the road side come nightfall and looked at their wares, which mostly consisted of very loud travellers handbags, cushion covers and slippers so we didn’t fancy anything.

On the second day we moved to the guest house we‘d paid for (slight downgrade as we lost the TV, but not too bad considering so much cheaper) and full of good intentions, we hired a couple of bicycles and went for a ride around town. We are finding that hiring a bicycle is really a great way to get out and explore a city. However we didn’t make it to a temple, instead we went to a local shopping centre to have a look around which was an experience. We cycled around the shopping centre, which looked like a building sight (we weren’t even sure it was open), until we found a place to tie up our bikes, and then found a tiny entrance between some stalls. It turned out there were 3 floors of little market like stalls inside, so we perused all the fake goods they had on offer. Then we went for a cycle to Laos’ version of the Arc de Triomph which interestingly was built with the cement donated to build an airstrip, and then managed to find our way back home again in time for dinner. Who needs a map when you’ve got a large river running down one side of the city for direction!

The following morning we caught the 09h30 bus to Vang Vieng, which is where people go for the tubing on the river. The whole way along our travels in S.E.A we have seen guys with vest tops for the tubing in Vang Vieng, so we had high expectations of a fun time. Well either that, or one company was handing out a lot of free t shirts! Thankfully it was only 4 hours on the bus to Vang Vieng. We decided not to book a hostel for the night, as the website only had 1 hostel available there and it got some really bad reviews. We would just have to turn up and walk door to door. We were arriving in the afternoon (1pm) so at least we’d be walking around in the daylight.

Vang Vieng

We got off the bus and managed to find a cheap hostel pretty quickly which was good. Then we went for a walk around and found the road that leads down to the river. There were some really beautiful views of the wide shallow river rushing over the stones, with the mountains looming on either side. It was clear that regardless of the beautiful setting, Vang Vieng is a party place for the young backpacking crowd. As it was filled with twenty year olds walking around with writing on their arms (from the previous days tubing), and a number of backpacker aimed bars and restaurants that were playing Friends episodes almost 24/7. That night we booked on to a tour for the following day that went to 4 caves, a Hmong village walk through, and ended with tubing for a couple of hours. The tubing is great fun. You are basically given a large tractor sized inner tube and you climb inside that and float down the river at your leisure, until you come across a bar that you like the look of. Of which point you put your hand up and a barman throws out a plastic bottle on the end of a rope, and pulls you in to their bar for a drink. There’s also music blaring out of each bar (the bars run down both sides the length of the river) and there are rope swings and slides that hang out over the river that make for interesting entertainment. We did see a couple of people in town with their legs / arms in splints, and I’ve no doubt that the low level of the water combined with the buckets of alcohol and the rope swings had something to do with that. We had a fun time, although the weather was a little overcast that day and the tubing was over all too quickly. We met a nice English couple (newly weds) on the tubing tour and decided to stay another night in Vang Vieng, so we could meet them the following day and go tubing again, in the hope of sunnier weather.

The next day we met up with the English couple again at 12h00 but it was still pretty overcast so we decided not to go tubing again afterall. Instead we booked a minivan to go to Luang Prabang that very afternoon. It turned out to be a private minivan journey as there was just nobody else booked on that day. It was a very winding bus journey and we arrived in Luang Prabang around 7pm in the dark, and went looking for a guest house. It turned out there were loads, but a number of them were fully booked or very expensive. After walking around for a while we were relieved to find one with a free room and put our bags down.

Luang Prabang

The next day we walked around Luang Prabang and went down to where the two rivers met which was very pretty. The town is situated on peninsula which makes it easy to navigate and it is an unusual mix of rather cosmopolitan western cafes and Buddhist temples, which means there are a lot of orange robed monks walking around. That afternoon we booked a 2 day Mahout tour, with one night in the elephant camp which I was looking forward to. We’d realised that we weren’t going to have enough time to go to Chiang Mai where the elephant treks normally run from, so I was happy to be able to fit in the asian elepahant trekking in Laos. Luang Prabang also has a great night market so later we had a walk around there and stopped insie for some street food, which was really tasty. It was basically a long corridor filled with different vendors‘ tables of food (with people making or braaing the food right there), and you would buy your food on one side and then sit down at their benches on the opposite side to eat it. The food was so tasty that we went back and ate there again the following night.

The next morning we got up at 6am to see the monks taking alms (rice) from the local people. It was interesting to see the local people kneeling down on mats and holding up chunks of cooked rice to the passing monks (who were all in a long line in their orange robes), and the monk would put it in to a kind of basket they were carrying and rapidly move on. Apparently the donated rice is the monks’ main diet. However it was really early, so we headed back to bed afterwards for some more kip. Later we booked a flight to Bangkok and then we’d arranged to meet up with the guys from the tubing tour (the glory of email), so that we could share a tuk tuk to a massive waterfall for the day. The colour of the water at the waterfall turned out to be really beautiful and it had multiple levels with pools that you could swim in (although a touch cold). There was also a bear sanctuary there were we got to see some black moon bears which was pretty cool.

The following morning we went on the mahout course. They were meant to pick us up at 8h00, and at 08h30 a man rolled up, whereupon he just walked us down road to their offices, with us carrying our bag - humph. After another wait we got a minivan to the elephant training camp, where we checked in to our rooms overlooking the river (great views) and got changed in to our standard issue blue denim mahout outfits (hilarious). Later we got to ride on the back of an elephant in one of those big box seats. Then we got to learn some of the Laos mahout commands (Bai means go!) before riding on the back of the elephants necks which was great fun if a little scary. I half expected the elephant to shake their head, or put their head down suddenly which would have resulted in a big fall, but they were very well behaved and did none of the sort. Steve and I were riding on the biggest (lead) elephant of the group knicknamed Katoey. Katoey is the word for ladyboy, as although he was the biggest male in the heard apparenty he showed no interest in the ladies lol. Later we went to see Henri Mahouts grave site which was a total non event and after a spot of lunch were in for some real fun. We got back on the elephants necks and rode them down to the river, were it was their bath time. Or our bath time depending on how you look at it. You are sitting on the elephats neck and their mahout is standing on their back behind you, shouting commands like Bon Bon, which basically causes the elephant to dip down in to the water or spray water over its head from its trunk, totally soaking you. It came as a bit of a surprise that my elephant was a snorkelled and insisted on dipping his head completely underwater each time, rather than just spraying water. I actually fell off the elephant a number of times and the trainer had to drag me back on to his back again. At this point Steve was on another elephant next to me, and his clearly loved the water and was going mental throwing his trunk in to the water and liberally spraying water over Steve - awesome fun.

The next morning we got up at 06h00 to meet the elephants and take them back down to the river. They were covered in sand from having chucked it on to their own heads the night before. So we had one last ride on the elephants necks in the early morning light. However we opted out of bathing them as it was just too cold and we couldn’t face the freezing river water that early in the morning. We had some brekky and lay about until 11h00, before we we kayaked back to Luang Probing ( I know, I know more kayaking but they promised me a shorter easier paddle this time lol). We stopped at a couple of villages and saw blacksmiths making knifes and cow bells out of steel and some women weaving with wooden looms which was pretty cool.

When we got back to Luang Prabang we picked up our bags at the travel agency and took a tuk tuk to a new hostel (cheaper and on the river), that some friends had recommended. That evening we met up with the Owens family, who we’d met in the Galapagos and had a great time catching up over dinner in the night market.

The following day we put a load of laundry in, and then visited the national musuem which is the old kings palace. The mosaics in the throne room made of Japanese glass on red painted walls are really beautiful. There was also a gorgeous gold temple at the entrance of the museum with the usual pink borganvillia tree flowering outside. Then we went to a Wat (temple) overlooking the river, which was beautiful too and had more of the glass mosaics, and the funerary building which was painted in gold. We saw some monks that were resident at the temples looking out of the windows, and some of them are pretty young. Apparently most men in Laos will spent at least a few months in a temple as a monk at some point in their lives.

That was pretty much it for our time in Luang Prabang, and Laos for that matter, as the following day we had a 05h30 pickup for the airport to catch our flight to Bangkok. Our next and final country stop would be Thailand! Bring on the relaxing time in the sunshine with the beautiful beaches!

Love to all at home,
Kirst x