One last stop before leaving Laos

Sunset on Don Det. Photo by Simon Whistler.

Si Pan Don, or 4,000 Islands, in southern Laos is one of the most beautiful, relaxing places I've ever been. I planned on staying three or four days but ended up leaving – the day my visa was set to expire – two and a half weeks later: in love with the islands, heartbroken to leave, but glad I had experienced – if only for a moment – paradise.

Of the 4,000 islands there are only three that welcome tourists: Don Khong, Don Khon and Don Det. Don Kong, the biggest island by far, is for not-so-adventurous adventurers who prefer their electricity on demand and their distance from the mainland minuscule. Don Khon is the getaway for those who want a little luxury with their seclusion; its pricey air-conditioned digs tend to keep the seedier backpacker elements at bay.

Then there is Don Det.

Connected to Don Khon by a narrow, colonial-era railroad bridge, Don Det is the backpacker haven of Si Pan Don – and with good reason. It's one of the cheapest places to stay and eat in Laos and the island's vibe is all about perfecting the art of doing nothing. But the island is also on the verge of being spoiled by tourism, motorbikes and television, and I soon came to the conclusion that I had arrived on Don Det just in time and entirely too late.

*****

Si Pan Don's water is a ruddy, glistening blue and is probably the cleanest water anywhere along the Mekong: I swam in it, bathed in it and did my laundry in it. If it's possible to have a relationship with a body of water, then this is where I fell in love with the Mekong. Bathing was an everyday ritual for everyone, but for the children it was more like a giant pool party. From my bungalow porch I would watch kids pull up in boats, call to their friends, strip naked and jump in. Foreigners on tubes drifted lazily in the river's eddies, soaking in sun and slowly paddling their way to tiny islands in the middle of the river. Small boats threaded the calm blue water, their fisherman casting nets from skinny prows.

Everyday the sun made its inexorable trip from one side of the island to the other, and at midday there was nothing to do but sit in the shade and wait it out. Local boys played petanque in the dirt, the dusty pattern-etched balls shining silver in the afternoon light.

Conversation among the locals was an all day affair – like any good gossip – and banter bounced between yards across the island's main dirt path, a rising and falling chatter I couldn't understand but which always had the air of nothing in particular. Smiling women leaned on fence posts, their teeth stained red with the blood of the betel nut, the dirt at their feet spotted with spittle.

Clusters of palm trees dotted the landscape, while dense vegetation ringed the rest of the island. In the middle of it all, a solitary wat was surrounded by acres of rice fields that were barren during my visit but in the rainy season would fill with tiny green shoots. Unlike most of Laos, which benefits from basic irrigation, Don Det is solely dependent on the rain to grow its rice, so there is only one growing season, from which the harvest is not even enough to last the year (an average family on Don Det consumes hundreds of kilos of rice each month).

The island teemed with life: black and red ants, earwigs, butterflies, hairy wasp-like bugs, jumping spiders, white spiders, water striders, frogs, chickens, ducks, roosters, pigs – huge pigs that looked unable to pick themselves up out of the mud they wallowed in – cows, small birds, monkeys, myna birds, cockatoos, dogs and cats. It was like living on a giant farm with nothing fenced in or tied down, except for the smaller pigs confined to ropes tied to palm trunks waiting for the coming slaughter.

In the evening the shadowy hills of Cambodia, visible beyond the lush density of the islands, seeped into the muggy night as the sun made its final dip into the clouds and Laotian haze.

*****

Everyone's stay on Don Det turned from three days to three weeks and the most common declaration was, "I'm leaving the day after tomorrow." In my first week on the island, I changed my departure ticket three times. Eventually the tour bus agent just wrote me a blank ticket and told me to fill in the date when I was ready to leave. I filled it in once and then changed it two more times before I actually left.

Even the locals used the word "tomorrow" loosely – it usually just meant soon. In fact things progressed so slowly on the island that, according to one farang who had lived on Don Det for a couple of years, simple project might take months or years to complete. Piles of wood, concrete and bamboo that I first assumed to be discarded junk were actually works in progress. Most everything was under perpetual construction.

The biggest project on Don Det – connecting the island to the surrounding electrical grid – has been moving at a river snail's pace for several years now. Last year, concrete pylons used to string the electrical wiring started arriving at the main dock, but the crane broke and the locals couldn't upload them off the beach before the rainy season hit; when the water level rose the pylons became buried beneath silt, sand and mud.

While I was on the island, there was a scramble to unearth the pylons and get them off the beach before the rainy season hit again. But the process was slow and the truck that came to haul them away could only handle two at a time. It trundled its way down the middle of the island up and over the low runnels of dirt that broke the rice fields into brown patchwork.

Every business and most houses on the island depended on some kind of gas-powered generator. The generators typically ran from 6 p.m. to midnight; the exception being restaurants that needed to use their generators during the day for the occasional fruit shake order, which required the use of a blender.

According to several locals the electricity will be good for some on the island and bad for others. Many of the already established businesses and guesthouses have enough money for the initial installment and the bills. But many families cannot afford the large upfront fee and the steep monthly rates (electricity is far more expensive in Laos than in the United States). And what will the juice bring? Loud music? Televisions? Lights on all night?

"Don Det is dead," a French traveler named Fred told me. "Electricity is coming."

*****

In my two and a half weeks on the island I also had the pleasure of getting acquainted with a family who ran a restaurant and a set of bungalows called Peace & Love. They often invited me to eat at the family table and we conducted informal English-Laos lessons while sopping up delicious soups and dipping sauces with sticky rice. One morning I had snails for breakfast. The next night I ate fresh mussels from the river stewed in a pungent ginger and green onion broth. One afternoon I was treated to fresh green papaya served with a simple spicy dipping sauce – dried chilis, sugar, garlic and vinegar – that we were told was "spicy number five" on a scale of seven. Spicy number one was for Laotians only.

Papa Kai and Mama Kam headed up the family. Papa Kai was skinny and quiet and had an easy smile. He had short gray hair and was enthusiastic about learning English. One morning I watched him cutting yellowed tobacco leaves with a machete in the shade of the house. Mama Kam was slightly stooped and talkative; she had an animated, nasally voice and became quite silly after a couple of Beerlaos.

They had seven kids in all. The two youngest daughters were going to school in Thailand but the rest of the family lived on the island. The oldest son, Vilay, ran a restaurant and guesthouse down the road. The next oldest, Kampai, was married and had two daughters who lived with his wife in Pakse. Kampai was struggling to start up a tour business but his English was limited and business was slow. Posai was the family's handyman, and he ran Peace & Love's bungalow operation with his wife who was quiet and stern. Sesai was the most Western of all the children. He often wore a blue basketball jersey and attended school in Pakse where he was studying to be a banker. The third daughter, Mai, ran the restaurant with her fiancee, Mikao, who was a competitive jokester and spoke mostly in bursts of English slang.

In general it was easy to mix with the locals on the island. Most of them didn't speak English and so they depended on friendly tourists to bring in other friendly tourists. Who are the farang and what do they want? This is the question the villagers were asking themselves. Businesses tried desperately to pull farang in, and they each followed the other's lead, with one business watching another when, for instance, fans were installed in a restaurant or a new drink was introduced on a menu.

Tourism was, for the most part, still a mystery on Don Det. And while most of the time things happened slowly, when change came it often came overnight.

*****

Unfortunately, four days after my arrival on Don Det, my livelihood was stolen from me. I came home one night and settled into my bungalow's hammock and fell asleep. I awoke in the middle of the night and moved into my bungalow, neglecting to bring my bag with me. When I woke up a few hours later it was gone. My bag turned up later that morning at a restaurant down the path, emptied of all but my passport, a notebook, a couple of video tapes and some pens. My cameras, voice recorder, Blackberry phone and everything else – even my harmonica and the book I was reading – were gone.

I spent a frustrating half hour trying to explain to one of Papa Kai's sons, Kampai, what had happened. Since he was one of the only locals I really knew on the island I figured he could help. When Kampai realized what I was saying he took me on his motorbike into the village and found the only two people on the island who could speak passable English. I explained to them what happened and they called over a local authority. A conference ensued under the awning of an Internet café at the village's main crossroads.

I sat on the back of the motorbike while Kampai and the three men discussed the situation. The conversation went on for 45 minutes or so while I tried to follow along. The whole time little black ants kept falling on me from the awning and I kept brushing them off while trying not to act like they were bothering me. At one point I made clear that there was a U.S. dollar reward for the return of my belongings, but the men seemed to think that it had been farang, not locals, who had stolen my stuff, which meant there was little they could do. The ants kept falling, the men kept discussing and I tried to be patient. Then they started noticing the ants too, and everyone began animatedly brushing them off themselves, looking up to the awning to see where the ants were coming from. The group soon disbanded and Kampai and I headed back down the dirt path.

I never saw my gear again or heard anything more about it, but I refused to let the incident ruin my trip. They were just things, I kept telling myself. Shedding them turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me in Asia. I began seeing things in a fresh light: I no longer had to worry about whether or not my electronics were safe; the palm trees were greener and the water was bluer. I became free to pursue my travels.

Learning to live with less has been the lesson all along, and I learned it big on Don Det. I still wish I had my camera, and I lost a lot of good interviews on my recorder. But it was almost worth it just to say, "Meeting adjourned due to ants."

*****

The day before I left Don Det, I woke up early. The sun was just beginning to creep across the eastern side of the island. The sounds of families gathering in the morning and beginning their work drifted out over the rippled murk of the Mekong. A breeze blew through the slats of my bungalow.

Throughout the day clouds converged over the island and by afternoon thunder was rumbling across the rice fields. Eventually the sun was completely obscured by darkening storm clouds and the Mekong reflected the graying slate of the sky. Rain was foretold in the lifting of three white gulls from the water's rough in search of another roost.

Dust began to blow up from the path and the island became hazy with dirt particles and the smell of earth. Palms swayed in the wind and sand blew off the smaller islands in wispy threads. As the rain began, leaves and chicken feathers swirled up the dirt path; the Cambodian hills were almost completely hidden, reduced to opaque ridges of geographical proximity. Papa Kai's family scurried around battening down the house and collecting items from the dust-blown yard.

In the end it only sprinkled and the commotion passed without event. Two tubers could be seen drifting in the cool shower, their pale bodies bobbing in the rippled water, the only color against the rain darkened expanse of Si Pan Don.

It was time to move on. One can only take so much paradise.

A fisherman trolls the placid Mekong at sunset on Don Det. Photo by Simon Whistler.

The main village on Don Det consisted of some basic markets, a couple of Internet stalls and some restaurants. But what more could you want when the Mekong is your swimming pool? Photo by Simon Whistler.

In Laos' Si Pan Don. The idyllic setting of Don Det was perfect for swimming, tubing and just generally doing nothing. Photo by Simon Whistler.

No boat to Pakse: an interlude

While the similarities between buses and boats are minimal, it is important not to underestimate the potential confusion between the two, particularly when traveling through a country like Laos where everyone's English is broken at best.

For instance, when your desire to take a boat south down the Mekong River appears to be on the verge of realization, it's probably too good to be true.

There are many boats to Pakse? Oh, that's fantastic! We'll just get on the bus then and not ask any more questions. Thank you so much!

It was thus that we ended up on the night bus to Savannakhet, a crumbling colonial town in central Laos where there is not one boat to Pakse. When we arrived at 5:30 a.m., the town was dead and dark. We sat for a bit under a couple of strips of fluorescent tubing, which threw a diffuse pool of institutional light onto the black pitch of the bus station's parking lot. To add to the surreal circumstances, we wound up chatting with a couple of bubbly, spaced-out American girls who had been traveling non-stop for three days and were headed across the Laos hinterlands to the Vietnam border.

We smoked cigarettes and contemplated our two options: we could either stay at the station until daylight or take a tuk-tuk into town. We jumped on the next tuk-tuk with three local guys who were probably wondering why two backpackers were heading into town an hour before daybreak.

The town square – a couple of blocks from the Mekong – was a cobbled rectangle scattered with weeds and surrounded by small shops and a couple of extinguished lampposts with a small church at one end. We set our backpacks down, attempted to rally some optimism and hoped faintly that a coffee shop was just opening its doors. We found only the blank stares of shopkeepers and the incessant barking of neighborhood dogs that roamed the darkened streets with impunity.

We walked toward the river and found a bench on a corner near an abandoned set of amusement rides. In the fading darkness we could make out the eerie faces and animal shapes of a small train and the peeling paint of a miniature merry-go-round. As the silver horizon slowly loomed over the graying stucco buildings, we began to see people jogging and old men starting in on their morning bottles of Lao Lao. Clouds of mosquitoes converged on the street near the river. Wood smoke from breakfast fires smelled of banana leaves and burnt rice.

I set off in the direction of the nearest dock to find out about boats to Pakse, which was still a couple hundred kilometers to the south and the last big town before Si Pan Don (4,000 Islands), our final destination in Laos. There were boats available to Thailand, which was visible across the relatively narrow expanse of the Mekong. But a boat to Pakse? Laughable. I returned to tell Jen the bad news. We wandered Savannakhet's wide streets, along the river and past a large wat, occasionally followed by yet more barking dogs.

By the time we made it back to the town center, the sun was visible above the church and monks were beginning to make their daily rounds. Locals waited on street corners to fill the monks' simple begging bowls with rice.

We found a restaurant that was serving a breakfast buffet and we settled at an outside table and ordered coffee and fresh juice and waited for the hot tables to be filled with croque monsieur's, fried noodles, scalloped potatoes and steamed vegetables. I also ordered fried eggs, which turned out to be the best eggs I'd had in Laos, and I sopped them up greedily with crusty triangles of white bread.

We were tired, dirty and hot, and wanted to get moving again, so I walked back up to the river where I had seen a group of tuk-tuk drivers lounging in the shade. I found a driver I recognized from earlier when he had offered me a glass of Lao Lao, which I politely declined. He was excited for the early business and greeted me with a toothy smile. I could smell the acrid liquor on his breath as we haggled over a price to the bus station. We swung by the restaurant, picked up Jen and left the dusty streets of Savannakhet behind.

At the station a local bus was just leaving for Pakse. We purchased tickets and stowed our baggage underneath, while a group of boys loaded up the top of the bus with chairs, bags of rice, boxes of electronics and assorted luggage. Once on the road – windows wide open, the wind in our face and Savannakhet falling fast behind – we breathed a sigh of relief and settled in for what we thought was a three-hour ride.

But on the way to Pakse the bus stopped every 15 minutes, picking up and letting off, and more and more cargo was brought on board. Bags of sugar lined the aisle, and seating – dictated by a young man who possessed only a semblance of authority – became a constant game of musical chairs, with people being shifted arbitrarily up and down the aisle.

Also during the ride, I decided that while the mosquitoes might be bad it's the chicken-on-a-stick girls that really test one's patience. At every stop the bus was surrounded by a small army of food vendors who pushed unrecognizable items through the windows of the bus, while a contingent of children would actually board the bus and make their way slowly to the back, offering bottles of water, chips, chewy donut holes or – the most aggressive of them all – chickens-on-a-stick. A simple no was never good enough. The sticks of meat would just get shoved in closer, as if upon another inspection the foul birds would suddenly become appealing.

The soft sell hasn't made it yet to Laos.

By the time we arrived in Pakse, nearly six hours later, all I wanted was some non-stuck-through food and a shower and to move on past our strange little adventure – which was entirely my idea – looking for a boat that didn't exist.

Vientiane: Home of 10,000 Buddhas

Sawngthaew rides can be "more intimate" than bus rides and a great way to interact with locals, an expat guesthouse owner in Vang Vieng told me. He was recounting a ride he took to Vientiane years ago, where he witnessed a gaggle of village women get taken for their gold jewelry by a group of bean-game con men.

"Of course, it could just be boring and uncomfortable," he added.

Our sawngthaew ride from Vang Vieng was certainly intimate – perhaps slightly boring and uncomfortable – but no bean-game con men got on board. A sawngthaew is essentially a covered, open-air pick-up truck outfitted with two padded benches. In the back of ours, over the course of the four-hour journey, various characters got on and off: a monk with a slide-top cellular phone and a pack of menthol cigarettes; a farang in camouflage cargo shorts and his Thai girlfriend who wore hot pants and a pair of oversized sunglasses; an older woman with a baby and a blue plastic bag of tamarinds; a young man with bleached hair and a blingy bracelet; three schoolgirls in matching black-and-white uniforms; a stern-looking boy in green military fatigues; a middle-aged man who wore a dusty blue-and-white Adidas track jacket, a pair of knockoff Oakley's, and a white-patterned ball cap with an embossed dollar sign and a faux Major League Baseball emblem. At one point there were 16 people in the back, two in the front and the driver.

About an hour into the ride I opted for some sun and some breeze in my face, and ended up clinging to an iron bar on the roof of the truck for about two hours, unable to reclaim my seat. The red and yellow of communist hammer-and-sickle flags were ubiquitous along the road as we passed, and were passed by, convoys of green tarp-covered Chinese transport trucks. We had to change vehicles outside of Vientiane when the sawngthaew broke down, and we rode in a tuk-tuk the rest of the way into the city.

Vientiane sits just north across the Mekong River from Nhong Kai, Thailand, and its riverfront strip is a lively mix of French restaurants, business buildings and reggae bars. At first sight the city is hardly picturesque, but we soon found it had a character all its own, its people friendly and welcoming, and its streets pleasantly navigable.

We settled into a guesthouse in a quiet neighborhood a little bit out from the river near the National Stadium. The guesthouse had large rooms with vaulted ceilings and walls painted institutional green, and the beds were little more than elevated planks with tired mattresses, but we managed to sleep nonetheless.

The next day we headed out for some sight seeing. We first visited the 458-year-old Sisaket Wat near the city's center. The wat has a museum that houses Laos' largest collection of Buddha statues – 10, 136, to be exact. Some of the statues have been unearthed and rescued from construction sites and road projects, and many of them are damaged and burned relics from the Indochina War. The museum's curator, Mr. Soy, welcomed us to the wat, tying colored-thread bracelets to our wrists and wishing us good luck, good health and happy lives.

Mr. Soy told us about a man who visits the museum every day and cares for a particular, non-descript Buddha statue, which he believes is the Buddha. The man burns incense for the Buddha, keeps it covered with an orange cloth and leaves it little presents. Mr. Soy didn't know why the man felt that this Buddha was the one, but he said the man has been coming to the museum for years.

Later in the day, on our way to the massive memorial golden stupa north of downtown, we stopped off for an ice cream at a small roadside restaurant and ended up playing Chinese poker with a group of young locals, a couple of whom spoke quite good English, which is a rarity in Laos.

At the stupa, bands of Asian and Western tourists, led on by the monotonous drone of their tour guides' rambling, milled about the main square, snapping obligatory photos before dribbling back into their party-theme painted VIP buses on the way to the next cultural highlight – a phenomenon I've come to call "checklist tourism."

That night we found the Anou Cabaret, where a live band complimented stiff and tentative table service while singers crooned and the lead vocalist belted country western tunes in broken English. An informal ballroom dancing contest – waltz, salsa, tango, samba, fox trot – concluded with award certificates for the winners, and afterward simple improvised line dancing opened up to the public. Aware that we were the only farangs in the joint, we stayed seated.

It was in Vientiane that I began to theorize that there must be a massive industrial bakery somewhere deep in the jungle in Laos, churning out these little baguettes that have been on almost every menu we've seen in the country thus far. I picture the bakery operating 24-hours a day, employing brigades of scooter-driving kids who shuttle the light chewy loaves around the country.

On our last day in the city, we spent six hours at the southern bus station waiting for our bus to Savannaket, a small crumbling colonial town halfway to Si Pan Don (4,000 Islands) in southern Laos. At a small restaurant near the bus station we ate a quick meal of fried chicken – more bones and gristle than meat – with a bowl of rice and some clear broth with watercress floating on the oily surface. The waitress, pretty and bitter, sulked the food to our table; a towel was draped over her shoulders and her hair – in the middle of a dye-job – was pinned above her neckline. On the television a Thai soap opera played, in which a victim haunted his killer, while a half-dozen patrons sat glued to the screen. Two lethargic fans oscillated on the wall above our table.

At the station, I gave a small, shy boy a baseball I had been carrying since I left Denver, and we rolled the ball back and forth between us across the tiled floor of the terminal. My traveling companion, Jen, took out her green Frisbee and began tossing it to the locals. Soon, our little corner of the station was a pocket of gaming frivolity. A Thai boxing match played on the lone television, young men exchanging baht at the bout's conclusion. For dinner we ate cheese and, yes, baguette sandwiches, while dusk settled on the departing buses.

My. Soy, the friendly and informative museum curator at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane.

Monks' robes drying in the sun as seen through a fence at a small wat in Vientiane.

Offerings at a wat in Vientiane.

A shy monk at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane allows me to take a picture, but is unwilling to look at the camera.

The massive memorial golden stupa north of Vientiane's downtown.

Vientiane's busy riverfront avenue.

One of the 10,136 Buddha statues at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane, Laos. The statues have been collected from all over Laos, and the wat's museum claims the largest collection of the statues in the whole country.

A decorated Buddha at the museum at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane, Laos. A man who believes this statue is the Buddha came everyday to bring offerings and burn incense for the Buddha.

Buddhas at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane, Laos.

Golden Buddha statues at the Sisaket Wat in Vientiane, Laos.

A guide at Lusi Cave stares wryly at the camera. There were few attractions around Vang Vieng that didn't have an attendant waiting to collect a few thousand kip for admission.

Vang Vieng – dusty, hot and dry – during the day. For the most part, if people weren't tubing on the river, they were hiding out in their hotel room or bungalow – or holed up in a Friends bar – recovering from the night before. It was common to see tubing-injured Westerners limping down the street.

One of the main intersections in Vang Vieng, lit up at night by the glow of streetlights, fluorescent tubing and the glare of Friends on television sets.