Don Det

Don Det is just one of the islands that are dotted about in the middle of the Mekong river.  You bus it to a certain point and then get on a tiny boat.

Anyways we made it to Don Det despite Andy almost capsizing the boat to the island.  We chose Don Det because it apparently had a friendly vibe and was small enough to walk all the way round.  Plus you could watch sunrises and sunsets whilst sat by the riverside.  The accommodation we eventually found was great.  It was on the sunset side of the island.

We had the best intentions of watching the sunrises but I figured we'd have better luck with sunsets instead.  If there is one thing we've discovered about ourselves - it's that we're sunset people. We had a little restaurant across the path from our room who did nice food and was built over the river so you could sit and just stare at boats going by.

There were deck chairs that you could sit in with your Beer Laos and just watch the sun go down.  There was a lot of sunset watching going on some sober some not so sober.









Just some sunset shots for you.

We ended up staying for almost a week but then time was of the essence so we decided to move on to Cambodia.














We bought our ticket to Kratie (pronounced krachie).  I guess we had been quite spoilt up until now with transportation so when they said 'yeah, yeah ac bus all the way' I like a fool believed them! We got a longboat back to the mainland and arrived at the office to be ushered into a creaky old minivan.  There had I believe once upon a time been ac but the vents were rusted and falling off the ceiling so I figured maybe open window ac...  We then arrived at the border and 'the dude' as I shall call him took our passports and money and said he would sort it out.  As we all discovered later we should have done it ourselves because it would have been $25 as apposed to 30.  But hey I guess we could have been ripped off for more.  You have  to walk about 50 meters to go from the Laos border into the Cambodian border.  In the stretch we passed other backpackers going in the opposite direction.  It does feel a little like you're in a movie being swapped for ransom or something.  When we reached the Cambodian side we waited ages for 'the dude' to come over with our passports and for our AC Bus.

We eventually got our passports and 'the dude' disappeared once more never to be seen again.  It would have been fine but he left without telling us what was happening.  And so it was that 2 Germans, 2 Brits, 1 Australian and 1 Japanese man were left sitting around at the Cambodian border not knowing what was going to happen to us for 2 hrs.  Eventually another minibus turns up and everyone feels a moment of joy however we then had to wait longer for more tourists to turn up.  In the end we were all crammed into a minibus with another driver that was insane!  Then it started to rain and we had to put the luggage in with us to.  You could tell we weren't from these here parts because everyone was moaning but the people dealing with us didn't really seem to think there was a problem.

Ah me.