Khong Island 12-11-08

11-11-08
The train journey went very well. The half hour too late departure has been caught up during the night. It was not as colourful as I am used to in India, no conversation with local people - which is anyway hard because we hardly meet any people talking English - this is also due to the composition of the train cars; but it was clean and well organised. Arjan slept pretty good and I think I slept maybe 5 minutes.....
At arrival in Ubon Ratchathani, a bus took us to the Thai-Laotian border at Khamsing Pathoumxath, very simple border place; everything went quite smoothly. An other - Laotian - bus took us down to our next place of stay. On the way we made some stops for money change (for a day we felt almost like millionaires with the Laotian "kips" ....), lunch, and a visit to the Wat Phu.
Wat Phu is a small temple often compared with the Angkor era sites in Siem Reap (Cambodia), the famous ones we will visit later on this trip. Nice to visit this quiet place, hardly any tourists. We could get used to the very steep steps, frightening for Ingrid, but left alone by Arjan :-(( she had to go the way down on her own and she did it!!

To get there we had to take another simple van and a ferry to cross the Mekong river. The way back on the ferry was quite a surprise, we took a very simple ferry - certainly not authorised by the European security reglementation - a kind of wooden motorised "vlot" (sorry, we do not know the English word..), fun!

Another 2 hours of driving and another ferry to cross the Mekong again to get to Khong Island, 1 of the 4.000 islands of Si Phan Don.

So far the quality of our accommodation is OK, large rooms, good beds, electricity, this time no hot water. Today we could join an excursion, but being the single full day of our stay in Laos, we decided to spend it on ourselves and rented a bike to tour around the island. Pretty tough on too small bikes in over 30 C, but absolutely worth to suffer the 50 km! Lots of temples, monks, beautiful scenery (the rain season just finished, so everything is very green), rice farmers busy harvesting, buffels, ducks grazing the rice paddies, school kids yelling Sawadee (= Hello). That was so cute that Ingrid fell from her bike which frightened more the school kids than herself. She is doing fine, some superficial scratches ...

Tomorrow off to Banlung where we will stay for 3 nights, probably overthere no Internet.

A&I - Khong Island - hot & bright blue sky !