Four thousand Islands

The usual complaint of no sleep echoed in our heads as we arrived at the City of Pakse at 5.30am, 8 km's from the bus station we required, no choice other than to get a tuk tuk to our required destination (it really goes against the grain). The so called bus station was no more than a muddy field with a few market stalls kicking around and the lack of buses was a major concern. As it happened our particular journey involved no buses only pick up trucks similiar to tuk tuk's but with 4 wheels, not what we needed to know whilst both craving sleep, so with no say in the matter we sat in the back of our truck for 3 hours growing ever more aggitated...
After sitting in silence and feeling quite miserable we turned up at the port/jetty town to get our water taxi acrosss to the island of Don Det only to find the price had tripled from our original estimate, much haggling later and a bowl of noodle soup each we ended up paying the full asking price (stubborn twits wouldn't budge on their inflated prices)... In order to recouperate some money back we hunted out some bargain basement priced accomodation and found the cheapest accom in 10 months worth of travelling $2 US for a riverside facing hut with no electricity but a shed load of appeal (it faced the sunset over the Mekong river and gave us fantastic light shows every night) The Island itself comprised of nothing more than a few restaurants, guesthouses and fields of rice all bordering the Mekong as it spreads out into it's Delta.....extremely picturesque! We hired bikes for a day and went exploring...our Island (only 7km across) was connected to a 2nd slightly larger island via a small bridge, all in all it made for some great exploring including a rather magnificent waterfall /very powerful set of rapids! We had almost not bothered coming to these islands at all and what a mistake that would have been....relaxing in our hammock sipping a Lao Mohito and watching the sunset across the Mekong will be one of our highlights of SE Asia! But all god things must come to an end.....and that end came rather abruptly as from here we had to negoiate the border across to Cambodia!

Check out what view $2 buys you!

More hardcore mountain biking!

Oh Yeah!

Mohito o'clock! 25p a pop!