Si Phon Don

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For the past 5 days I have been in Laos (pronounced without the s its French spelling.)

I am currently in Pakse (pronounced Pak-say) and it is raining buckets. It is supposed to be the rainy season, but it didnt start really really raining until yesterday. It has been raining pretty hard for 24 hours now.

After leaving Phnom Penh I went north to a town called Kratie (pronounced Kra-chay). This was just a quick over night stop on the way to Laos. However they have one tourist attraction - freshwater dolphins. I went on a boat and we saw dozens of small gray dolphins. They look more like a porpoise than the bottle nose dolphin we think. They didnt jump out of the water too much, but they made really cool noises when they came up for air.

Then I headed north again to Stung Treng. Even though it was a small town it had some charm. I can say now after visiting 3 smaller towns in Cambodia, that they remind me a lot of South American towns. When the French were there they built a lot of buildings. Now, the buildings are run down and falling apart. They have the same charm as Spanish colonial towns. There is the mixture of french buildings, muddy streets, garbage and wooden/metal shacks. It is almost the same mixture as the old Spanish towns.

The transportation here is very easy to come by, but rarely comfortable. I went from Phnom Penh to Kratie in a bus sharing my seat -normally meant for 2 people - with a grandma and her grandson. Luckily they didnt have any chickens. Then from Kratie to Stung Treng I took a car. They fit 7 people in the car - 4 in the back, 2 in the front and 1 driver. Luckily he had a pillow for me to sit on because I sat in between the driver and the passenger on the emergency brake. From Stung Treng over the border I took a super fast speedboat. The kid sitting next to me had his eyes closed and his head tucked into his knees, because the wind hurt with the speed we were going. Then in Lao they have something call a two row. Which is a pick up truck with 2 planks of wood for seats - creating the two rows of seats. Then then have a very colorful metal covering over it all. Today there was 3 chickens (alive), 5 fish (dead), two huge bags of rice and 15 people all in the pick-up.

On Wednesday after crossing the border and taking another taxi and boat, I arrived at my destination: Si Phon Dan or 4,000 islands. There are thousands of small islands in the Mekong river. I found myself a bungalow that could quite possibly be one of the best values in the whole world. I had a wooden bungalow on stilts, with a porch and a hammock over the edge of Mekong for a whopping dollar! I thought they were joking when they told me the price. So I swung on the hammock, read books, ate good food and watched the sun set over the lush green hills for a total of $25 for 5 days. The island is really calm as the center is all rice fields with water buffalo roaming around. The coast line is all bungalows looking over the water that is a dark brown color now because of the rains. It makes a striking difference compared to the blue sky and green rice fields. There were also a couple waterfalls in between some islands. These islands also have freshwater dolphins but they are almost black and larger.

I stayed on an island called Don Det. It has a whole bunch of these bungalows and only 2 cars on the whole island. I woke up every morning to the sound of roosters, not a problem because I went to bed every night before 10pm because there wasnt electricity. So I highly recommend to anyone with 1,100 dollars and needing some relaxation time to hop on a plane - 900 to Bangkok and head down to 4000 islands to spend the left over 200 dollars laying in a hammock. It is beautiful, chill and so cheap! If it wasnt so difficult to reach I think many more people would be going. I think the fastest you could get there from Bangkok would be 20 hours.

Today I am trying to get prepared to go to an ecoresort for a day and then further up north. My original plans have to be modified because they have closed the capital city to all tourists for a 10 days. And it just happens that all buses travel through the capital to head north. They are closing it because there is a big conference with all kinds of important people from Asia. They are afraid of terrorism.

Hope the summer is going well for everyone else. Keep in touch, Laura