After Highway 18A, we decided that we needed a few days off the bike, and since the New Year was coming up, we booked it another 150km down the road to The Four Thousand Islands in Southern Laos. FTI are a bunch of small islets in the Mekong River, which spreads its wet fingery appendages up to 40km wide at this point, right at the border of Laos and Cambodia. Most of the 4000 are just tiny 1 square meter rocks or shrubs sticking out of the river, but two in particular, Don (island) Det and Don Khon, have become quite reputable among tourists as places where one can go and do absolutely nothing for as long as one desires. So that's what we did. Basically, the week of Dec 27, 2013 – Jan 2, 2014, were spent laying in a hammock, so my pictures of that time period pretty much just include:
Me and cute puppies
Some local kids harassing one of the puppies
We're on a boat muth@f**a!
This is what the island roads looked like. Here is us desperately searching for the cheapest bungalows.
As crazed and drunken as I appear in this photo, there was actually next to no alcohol, mint, or anything else but ice in this mojito "bucket." If you go to 4TI, do yourself a favor, and bring a week's worth of food in with you, otherwise prepare for constant disappointment.
The one "activity" we did do was tubing, which really just consisted of being carted up the Mekong in a boat, and then set adrift with a beer in hand, and left to your own devices to get back to the island. Oh and did I mention that there is one of the world's biggest waterfalls just a few kilometers beyond the island?
Here we are embarking into our tubes.
And here's the waterfall we were told to avoid. Ha
Chillin' on the bank of the Mekong.
Always some nice sunsets to be seen.
(Flood?)swept landscape
Goodbye Mark and Claire! May peace be with you and happy trails! See you again (in Bangkok?)
We got tired of our bungalow owner's crappy food and losing our laundry, so on the last night we decided to rough it and sleep on the beach! Beautiful.
We also made some pretty lame attempts and writing with light and ringing in the new year with style.
Then the next morning, I was on a boat, muth@f**kF@ again! This time in the opposite direction, toward Cambodia! Goodbye Laos! Nice knowin' ya! I'll miss your pristine natural environment, super friendly folks, and decent food. But a new adventure awaits!
