I slept through most of the day on the way to the Cambodia/Laos border, if you can call it a border…..we arrived around 5pm at a wooden barricade and got off the bus walked through Cambodian immigration and had to pay a dollar bribe to leave the country and then through the Laos checkpoint where the bribe was two dollars. The bribes are technically illegal and the money is pocketed by the guards but the government seems to ignore the practice. Also the visa price at the border seemed to be inflated and I was glad of my decision to get my Visa in Bangkok to the sum of a ten dollar saving…. sweet….ha-ha take that corrupt border officials…
The bus we were on went on into Laos and we jumped back on once through the checkpoint …to be honest the security was so lax you could have just stayed on the bus as it drove through and got in without going through immigration. After another 30minutes we got to our stop and a large group of backpackers were transferred onto a smaller vehicle and told we would have to pay to get a boat onto Don Det Island even though the price was supposedly included in the ticket we had bought in Cambodia….
This is a classic scam …no one was going to go back into Cambodia to sort the mix up out and after a few sulks and grumbles from the group we all ended up paying an extra and inflated price to get the boat to the island ( a five minute journey for 3 dollars each the boat men and bus touts ate well that night ).
Don Det is an island in the Mekong that borders Cambodia. The area is called four thousand Island as during the dry season the river is low enough to reveal thousands of small islands along its course before it drops over waterfalls into Cambodia.
Once on the island the larger group split up into smaller groups wandering around in search of rooms….ended up finding a cheap place on the river with a guy from the bus called Andre. Andre was a kickboxing anthropologist from Moldavia. You don’t meet many of those on the road… We got adjoining bungalows that shared a hammock equipped porch overlooking the river. That night bought a cheap bottle of whisky ( one dollar for a large bottle) and chilled by the river…..
Next morning the true beauty of our location was revealed. (Having arrived after dark the setting of our lodgings had concealed.) We were set on a bend in the river with a few sand banks in the middle that you could swim to. Met a cool Israeli/American guy called Gadi staying next door later in the morning and then did a bit of exploring during the day before settling into chill out mode and playing guitar in the afternoon sun on the porch… the highlight of the day was watching the sun set incredibly over the Mekong from my hammock…..
The next 5 days consisted largely of the same thing, getting up around 10am, eating breakfast at a local restaurant, chilling on the porch , going swimming , watching the sunset and then eating dinner before drinking whisky and coke on the porch and crashing out early……hung out with Andre, Gadi and a cool group of Germans for most of the time I was there…………
Some rare moments of proactively included walking around the island through some cool village huts and farm yards, renting a canoe and rowing upriver to find good spots for swimming, (saw some amazing views of the river island with the hills of Cambodia in the background along the way,) and playing a cool card game called slaps and that was about it, My main motivation for my lethargy had been financial but think I felt a lot better spiritually after a few days also before I knew it 6 days was up and it was time to move on…….
I have to say four thousand Island is the most chilled place I have ever been. The locals are very relaxed and friendly and the village is still under developed enough that its pretty much closed down by midnight. The mantra here is relax, you can easily do nothing there all day and still feel like you have achieved something. The sunsets over the river alone will make it one of the highlight areas of the trip…..would highly recommend as a two week holiday for any one feeling mega stress out …..okay so I managed to get off the island before it sucked me in for the whole months duration of my visa ….. now its time to head to northern Laos quickly before hitting China.
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