Dramatic Rescues and Lots of chilling on 4,000 islands

The journey to the border town of Stung Tren was fairly uneventful and even arrived an hour and a half earlier than expected. We were the only westerners on the bus so got a lot of attention, especially from the babies. Dunno if I mentioned before, Cambodia is full of babies, and their babies don’t wear nappies, so after a while the bus did start to pong a bit.

After a quiet night in Stung Tren (our first night since leaving Australia without air-con, we’re really trying to live like real backpackers now), we headed off on our adventure across the border. We had a fun crew on our bus, who turned out to be our new best mates, and who we will be seeing a lot of over the next few weeks. Armed with a big gang of us, we decided we had the power to stop the blatant corruption at the Cambodian/Laotian border by refusing to pay the extortion charge of $2 to cross. Our brave stance proved successful on the Cambodian side, but not so on the Loas side. We had a two hour standoff with the horrible border officials, who thought our stance against their illegal bribery was hilarious. They removed all their name tags and refused to talk to us. Eventually our bus had to go so we angrily paid the bribe. The next part of the journey was an hour through jungle on a dirt track, and then the scariest boat ride ever over to the 4,000 islands. Nine of us and our backpacks were perched precariously on this tiny little speedboat which was barely above water. Mark, always the unfortunate one had to balance himself on the bow of the boat!

Having bonded with our traveling companions during our stand-off at the border, five us became a little “gang “ on the island. Three independent travelers – Dylan and Aaron from England and Julie from Perth, and the next day Farah joined our little brigade and we’ve all been inseparable since!

Si Phan Don, which literally translates as 4,000 islands is a bunch of lush little islands in the middle of the Mekong on the Cambodia/ Laos border. We choose to stay on the backpacker island of Don Det. Reading “the bible” (Lonely Planet) you would think this place was totally undiscovered, but its far from that, there’s tonnes of backpackers there, but thankfully no tourists staying there, although on the neighbouring Don Khon loads of annoying Koreans and Thais come over on daytrips from the mainland! There is still no electricity on the island and all accommodation is on huts on stilts on the Mekong. Generators pipe up from about 5.30pm til 9.30pm giving limited light and blaring TVs. The five of us went for the luxury option – that is riverside huts, with big double beds, mosquito nets, ensuite toilets, big verandahs with hammocks….for only €2 per hut per night…OK the toilet was a filthy hole in the ground, but hey, who’s complaining! And it was actually really easy to sleep with no fan or air-con cos you get a lovely breeze from the river at night.

There is very little to do on the island but chill, drink and eat! The first day was spent testing the different bars on our island and getting to know each other. Sunday we bravely rented bikes and went discovering the neighbouring island of Don Khon, which has less accommodation but as I said more daytrippers. The islands are really beautiful, you cycle through all the farms and paddy fields, seeing everyone going about their day’s work. The main attraction on Don Khon is a massive, scary waterfall across the Mekong. It really is huge, there is no way anyone could get down it alive. We then went for some further exploring and found some lovely secluded beaches, where we could swim in the murky (but clean) brown water of the Mekong, and of course discover the bars on the other side and eat the most disgusting pad thai I’ve ever tasted. The two islands are separated by the only piece of railway ever built in Laos, a now disused railway bridge, which is so bockety it caused most of the chains to come off the bikes!

The island is so tiny that after 24 hours, we knew most of the other backpackers, but drinking at night, our group would swell to 8-10 people.

Monday was the real adventure of the trip! Tubing is a really popular activity in Laos, but it mostly centres around the northern town of Vang Vien, none of us had ever tried it before and saw signs for it all over Don Det so we bravely decided to give it a go. It hadn’t occurred to us that we hadn’t seen or heard of anyone else who had tried it on the island. Our guide (guy who ran our huts) didn’t offer us much information, just dropped us off in his boat about 2km upriver and told us to float back in these huge big tractor tyre inners. Seems simple enough. The tubing itself was fairly boring. Bored Julie was trying to invent ways to make it interesting by trying to stand on the tyre and do all sorts of acrobatics. Getting to shore was the problem…. We could see where the shore was, could get quite close, but there was no way the strong current of the Mekong was going to bring us in. We paddled and swished with all our might, but none of us but Julie managed it. At this stage, me (forcing Mark to come with me) had got caught in quite a rapid current and was floating way down the island, far away from the dock. Of course I panicked, which made me go faster…this was lunch time and all the backpackers were sitting on the riverside cafes watching out as I screamed “Help, help” waving my arms! A passing fisherman thought I was being friendly and just waved back!! Julie managed to get the attention of our guide, who came out in his boat to rescue us. We couldn’t climb into the big fishing boat though so just had to grab onto the wood at the side and be dragged to shore! At this stage none of the others had got down quite as far as we did, and managed to propel themselves to shore somehow, getting bitten by fish and destroyed by river weeds and brambles along the way!!

So for the rest of the day, we were minor celebrities on the island…and also very relieved to be alive!! We warned everybody else not to be as brave as us!!

We spent the afternoon recovering in the island’s famour bakery. It really is heaven on earth…although the same can’t be said of the Aussie chef!!! After a diet of baguettes and laughing cow for the last 3 weeks, proper baked cakes and goodies were like Christmas and Easter all at once – we savaged on apple muffins, caramel slices, chocolate donuts, carrot cake….mmmmmm. We also discovered the local whiskey. A bottle of Loas whiskey costs only €1, so we started a little whiskey party which finished up around 4am (I went to bed at 1am) on Julie’s balcony, with seven bottles of whiskey being drunk by 8 of us (and a few randomers like the baker who joined in having heard the noise from the “street”).

Tuesday, we really just wanted to chill after the big night from the night before. We started off with a hangover breakfast from the Reggae bar which contains a valium and paracetamol!! Valium and weed are more common on the island than drinking water or bread!! There is a constant smell of people smoking weed wherever you go! After breakfast we cycled back to the Don Khon and spent the day chilling at one of the lovely beaches we’d found a few days earlier. We celebrated our last night on the island with a “Happy Birthday Cake” from the Reggae Bar!