4000 Islands - Laos

With renewed energy and renewed optimism, I crossed the border into Laos on my bike. The border police were already looking at me with amusement, just as I was already sweating at kilometer 0. About 70 km before the border, the landscape gradually changed from the fertile, diverse and green jungle into a steppe landscape in which the landscape was covered by a layer of red dust, the vegetation became rarer and there was not a single place that still provided shade. The sun baked the ground and everything on it until every last drop of water was gone. While the dust settling on my glasses continued to obscure my vision, I thought for the first time whether it was really a good idea to cycle 1400km through this environment... I quickly convinced myself that the surroundings and the... Temperatures would definitely change a little further north and first I would be able to gather energy and strength in Don Det.

Don Det is one of the "4000 islands", a huge archipelago located on the Lao-Cambodian border in a large extension of the Mekong. Some of the islands range from 5km in diameter to a few meters and, due to their increased resistance, form turbulences in the water, which ultimately produce hundreds of waterfalls. Simply fantastic. I was warmly welcomed into my hostel and quickly fell asleep from all the excitement. The next morning I met the friendly Berliner Paula, who impressed me with her knowledge of theater, opera, the eras and pieces of classical music and her knowledge of world literature. The fact that it emerged at the end of the conversation that she had a boyfriend didn't diminish my sympathy for her in any way, but it was still a reason to be briefly annoyed. I went from island to island on my bike and spent a long time in the seasonally very deep and almost 'dry' river bed of the Mekong and wrote a lot on my blog. And when I say 'dry', I mean in relation to the rainy season. The Mekong simply has a dimension that I have never seen before and so its water level varies by meter over the seasons, but even in the dry season it is still of a size that is more reminiscent of an infinitely long Loch Ness.

I then went swimming and kept an eye out for the Mekong dolphins. That's no joke! There is a separate species of dolphins that are only found in the Mekong. But they are becoming increasingly rare and some told me that they last saw the dolphins twenty years ago, others two weeks ago. Another told me that on a boat trip a few days ago she saw a corpse floating with its extremities tied together and a lettering probably scratched into its stomach with a knife. Here I realized once again that I had now entered a country that is located in Southeast Asia, but is nowhere near as developed and globalized as Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia or the Philippines.

In the evening I was still tinkering with my two-wheeler and adjusting the last screws when Paula came over and told me that she had had a huge argument with her boyfriend and whether I would like to go out for a bit with her and the others. So we strolled to a well-known and super cozy library, which turns into a bar with live music in the evenings and then we talked... for a long time. I liked her, she liked me, I respected the boundaries of the relationship she was in and she told me that their travel romance would probably end soon and that we should just see each other in Germany. We exchanged our book tips, relationship stories and techno preferences for a long time until we finally decided to go to sleep because I wanted to leave the next morning. When we said goodbye in front of our bedroom doors, we fell into the next conversation and spent at least half an hour telling each other our favorite words from the German language, such as robber, babbling, strolling, palate cleanser, globetrotter, fuchsteufelswild, smacken, rubbeln, scoundrel, cheeky badger etc. etc ..

The next morning she got up to say goodbye and waved to me as I set off into the distance with my new bike "Master Hora". We hugged each other for a long time and a little too tightly, considering we only met yesterday. We both were and are big fans of Walter Mörs, the author of "The 13½ Lives of Captain Blueberry" and so I asked her if she could smell the smell that was in the air here. She looked at me in surprise and I said "smell Don't you like the smell of cinnamon and fires burning in the distance? That's what adventure smells like."

She laughed, I drove.