Hello Laos

Which means "Hello Laos", because with a word or two in Lao, you can bring a smile to people, especially children.

After a 4-hour journey, I arrived at one of the "4000 Islands" called Don Det. Due to the low season, finding a bed was very easy. I stayed in a triple room for €3 per night, not bad I think. In retrospect, I will question the choice of accommodation again.

For the first two days, I did nothing except for a few short explorations, because it was actually the first time in my life that I had problems with the heat. The thermometer showed 38°C in the shade. The perceived temperature was 48°C!!!

So, sleeping through the night was out of the question. In addition, there was a sheet of plastic under the fitted sheet (like what you find when testing mattresses). It was certainly good for hygiene, but the plastic acted like an additional heater, causing me to lose about 3 liters of water per night and wake up sweaty in the morning. Well, we had to shower in the morning and evening anyway, and sometimes in the afternoon too...

Originally, I was supposed to return to the capital city of Vientiane the next day, but the planned kayaking tour had to be postponed to the next day due to lack of participants. So I extended my stay for a day and will do the tour the next day. I took the scooter to visit some waterfalls on the island, passing hair-raising "bridges" along the way. Apart from an old railway from the French colonial era, there is not much to see on the islands. Like in other parts of the country, people take it very easy here. Doing nothing is definitely what everyone is best at!

The highlight came on the last day. After a mediocre breakfast (I still don't understand why you always get or try to prepare "European breakfast" everywhere. I would much prefer local breakfast), we initially went 45 minutes downstream on the Mekong. Then we went to the first waterfall, where we had to leave our kayaks and walk or swim through a side arm of the Mekong. After that, we continued to the Cambodian border, where we switched to a motorized boat. Our guide started a small grill on the wooden boat and prepared our lunch. We had chicken with vegetables and rice, along with bananas, pineapples, and watermelons.

While we were eating, our guide signaled for us to be quiet. Just 2 minutes later, we saw the rare Irrawaddy dolphins in the distance. These dolphins are very shy, so you can only guess at their presence in the photos. However, the sound of the dolphins breathing was just as you would hear in documentaries, very impressive!

Irrawaddy dolphins have short dive times, on average they resurface every minute.

It's a great feeling to see such rare animals in the wild, and who knows how long that will still be possible. The governments of Cambodia and Laos are planning new dams on the Mekong, so the survival of these dolphins is far from certain. Plus, there are only about 80 of them left in the Mekong.

We then went back by pickup to one of the largest waterfalls in the world (Khonephapheng). During the rainy season, 50 million liters of water rush along here every second, mind you! With a width of 10 kilometers, it is the widest waterfall in the world and the largest (in terms of volume) in Southeast Asia. Absolutely impressive nature that rounded off the day.

The next day, I headed back to Pakse, where my flight to Vientiane was supposed to take off. There were exactly two reasons for this flight.

The first: I didn't feel like taking another 14-hour bus ride. With the flight, which only cost 40€, I reduced the travel time to about 5 hours. Plus, the comfort is just better.

The second reason: The airplane. A Chinese MA60, a propeller plane!

The airport was the smallest I have ever seen. There was one gate for international flights and one for domestic flights. At least, that's what I thought, because you actually had to go through different entrances, but on the tarmac it was the same gate.

The plane looked exactly like I expected, old and run-down. The seat reclined automatically as soon as you leaned back. The armrests were broken and the seats or covers had seen better days. Luckily, I was parked at the emergency exit, so I had plenty of legroom. Because of my seat, I also received a short briefing on what to do in case of an emergency. The stains on and the holes in the stewardess's uniform were the highlight. Apparently, the motto of this airline (Lao Skyway) is to arrive, everything else is a bonus! But isn't that the most important thing?

The flight was quite relaxed, a bit noisier and more turbulent inside, but that's normal for smaller planes. Checking flying on a propeller plane off my list!

In Vientiane, there is still not much to see. I visited the triumphal arch and a temple and spent the evening with an American and a Filipina. They gave me some tips for my future destinations, including the Philippines, which sounded very interesting.

Next stop: Luang Prabang. I spent one day doing nothing and on the other day, I visited the impressive Kuang Si Waterfall. The waterfall may not be as impressive as the waterfall in the Thai Erawan National Park, but that would be asking for too much.

I spent the two evenings with a colorful mix of people, enjoying food and drinks. Here too, there were valuable tips for my future destinations.

Next, I went to Nong Khiaw and Muang Ngoy. I went to the local viewpoint for the sunrise. The ascent was not easy, especially since it had rained heavily the evening before, the clay steps were slippery, and the humidity was close to 90%. However, the view compensated and I could enjoy the morning tranquility completely for myself.

Nong Khiaw

The village of Muang Ngoy, where I spent two nights, can only be reached by a one-hour boat ride. At least there is still electricity here. After another 2 ½ hour walk, I reached the village of Houay Bo. Here are the GPS coordinates (20.6793260, 102.7118710), because Google only finds two restaurants there that have never or no longer existed.

The hours in the village were challenging even for me. We showered in the village well, and in the evenings, there were of course several people gathered around it, which took some time. The daughter of my "host parents" happened to see my phone and immediately wanted to take photos. And it didn't stop there, some games were played on the phone. It didn't take 10 minutes before there were about 15 other children gathered around the phone, watching.

At some point, I wondered why the women were searching each other's hair for something. Honestly, it looked a bit like monkeys searching for lice. When someone handed me a pair of tweezers and asked me to continue, I was completely confused. People explained to me with gestures and broken English that I had to remove the gray hairs. Ahhh okay, apparently, I didn't do a good job because I was quickly replaced, but it was also strange to examine the head of a stranger for gray hairs. Well, we all had fun. So, where is my phone now?! I simply looked for the next crowd of people and promised the kids that they could play again tomorrow.

My mattress was in a "hut" on the first floor. I don't want to know when the last guest slept here, and I don't want to mention what else I found. Although I went to bed at 10 o'clock, I couldn't get much sleep. Until 1 o'clock, the cows and buffaloes made an incredible noise, and at 5 o'clock, the roosters competed for the loudest voice. Finally, I got up at 6 o'clock, played with the children, caught fish, and left promptly at 8 o'clock. In this village, like everywhere else in Laos, I saw an incredibly large number of children. Currently, over 300 people lived in this village, but in only 40 families. Definitely more than half of the residents were under 10 years old, and here it's not uncommon for the child of the eldest daughter to be as old as one's own child.

For the first time on my trip, I had really bad mood. After waiting in a bus stop for over 4 hours in 41°C heat for a bus that never came, I also had lightheadedness, headache, and diarrhea in the evening. Well, thanks a lot! To make matters worse, the power went out again and there was no water running from the tap, I'll spare you the details. The weather is starting to affect me more than I thought. For the past two weeks, the thermometer has shown over 40°C in the shade all the time, and the perceived temperature is 50°C. The Lao people are also struggling with the weather because it should already rain here every day and the rice should be planted, but for weeks there has simply been no rain in some regions, and if it does rain, it's far too little.

Let's see how it goes on and if I really want to sit in a bus for 12 hours each for the next two days with my stomach problems. But somehow I have to, because my visa expires in 4 days...

So, off to the Vietnamese border!

If you find the texts too long or too boring, please give me feedback, and I will try to be more concise next time :)

Oh yeah, an overview of my previous route can be found here:

https://www.polarsteps.com/DanielH5