Simply heavenly!

Eventually we had to move on and say goodbye to Laos. We flew from Luang Prabang to Bangkok, slept there for a night, and then immediately left early the next morning and continued on, first to Koh Mak and after a few days to the neighboring island of Koh Kood. The islands are located in the border area with Cambodia and were military bases until a few years ago. Tourism is still relatively new and the islands are more authentic and less spoiled than their counterparts in southern Thailand. The stay on these two islands is quickly explained. You can wonderfully do nothing! There is little traffic, good food, lots of rubber trees, but above all, beaches. And many of them are really quite secluded and still quite natural... So you simply rent a moped, spend the day with fruit shakes and Pad Thai, laze on the beach, or take a boat for a few minutes and go diving. There are actually no sights. Oh, well, Koh Kood has three waterfalls. So you tuck over endless forest trails and then walk to each natural spectacle. By the way, after the second waterfall, we gave up because we saw the rock step, but no water drops. Oh yeah, there was something... dry season... Although the weather was crazy here too and there were intense rains and thunderstorms almost every night. The sun was shining again during the day, everything was fine, except that there was sometimes a power outage or no internet.

What else? There are gas stations that consist of a barrel and a pump, crabs that live in seashells and try to be "something better," and monkeys trained to pick coconuts. That was really impressive. First, you hear a loud noise from a coconut falling to the ground from a height of 20 m and you are glad that you weren't standing or lying under it. A man with a monkey on a leash tells the monkey what to do (e.g., pick green or brown nuts). It then runs up the palm tree and harvests them. We found it very impressive, extremely effective, and probably lucrative. Handy little monkey! 😊