This time 8 years ago I wasn’t really aware of the country Laos. I was packing up my belongings in Dublin ready to fly to Bangkok in February 2002 for a six- or seven- month trip to Australia, taking in Thailand along the way.
Everything changed, a short time in Thailand became 8 weeks travelling through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, back into Thailand. 6 months in Australia became 11 and a half months for me.
My more adventurous travel partner suggested going further afield into Cambodia. I was nervous, but I went along with the idea. Thankfully, I was travelling with this friend otherwise I may not have ever visited Laos. By the way, the way I’ve been taught to pronounce Laos is not Lay-os, rather L-ow.
Thailand to Laos over a few weeks
The overland trip to Laos began in Bangkok around the 20th of February with us taking in Siem Reap in Cambodia (gateway town to the temples of Angkor Wat) and the capital Phnom Penh where we worked for two weeks online journalists and marketing copywriters even ghost writing for a Government Minister. Then in early March we spent about 10-12 days working our way up the Vietnamese coast by tourist bus (always ghastly) from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh to Hue or somewhere near Hue where we decided to take a bus into Laos and go to the 4,000 islands region in the south of the country.
The long road from Vietnam to Laos
The journey from here over the border into the town of Savannakhet in Laos was a nightmare. Leaving the town in Vietnam at 6pm we were told we’d get to Laos that night. Instead, a few miles outside of town the bus driver pulled over at a shebeen for a drinks/toilet break and said “bus is hotel”. We got the message when we arrived at the border crossing and he parked the Hiace bus conataining about 10 or 12 of us, by the side of the road. That night’s sleep was alternated between cramped conditions in the back of the bus and going out to lie on a sheet in the middle of the road that a couple (fellow travellers) had laid for a few of us to lie on. I moved back to the bus when I realised the sheet was actually at a crossroads.
The bus driver left us there that morning to make our way through the border crossing with our large rucksacks. Once officially in Laos the scary thing happened – we still had to get to the bus stop in the nearest town/village which was a few miles away. The answer was motorbikes and so there I was rucksack on my back clinging for dear life to the Laotian motorcyclist who drove me across a bumpy stretch of ground to the second bus bringing us to Savannakhet.
Getting a seat on the bus was grand, it was when it started filling up with people and products such as hens and so on, it became a bit of an eye opener. Later that day, St Patrick’s Day, we arrived in Savannakhet where we found accommodation for the night and arranged to get another bus to Pakse which was our stepping stone to the 4,000 islands area of the Mekong.
By bus and boat to Don Det
The bus journey from Savannakhet to Pakse was even more exciting and memorable than the previous one, this time with hens being stored right under my seat and guys sitting on the roof while the rest of us bounced up and down on hard wooden planks of seats on unpaved roads.
On arrival in Pakse the two of us again found accommodation and the following morning headed to the river where we managed to get a 9-hour slow boat down the Mekong to the island we wanted to get to. It was such a beautiful and memorable day. No toilets or any facilities mind you, this boat was like a rural transport network criss crossing the Mekong dropping locals off with their shopping (i.e. pigs and produce) at their homes, thatched huts with big satellite dishes hanging out of the roofs.
Our day-long journey ended on Don Det, but after a day or two there we chartered a boat to the famed Don Kong, a few hours downriver.
Bangkok by any means
A few days in Don Kong – the kind of place that’s so nice you don’t want to tell anyone about it – was all we had time for in order to rush back to Bangkok to meet friends – at 6am on the 26th of March outside a certain cafe in the backpacker street in Bangkok.
We got an early morning speed boat across the river to a village from where we could get a two-hour bus journey back to Pakse. I spent too long in Pakse on the internet, filing a piece for my travel column in Ireland on Sunday newspaper so that when we arrived by sawngthaw (kind of open backed bus/taxi) to the nearby border crossing, we’d missed all the buses into Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand from where we intended getting an overnight train back to BKK in order to meet our friends.
Instead we paid the vastly overpriced price of USD$20 for a man to bring us in the back of his modern ute, the hour or two journey to Ubon.
In the hands of Thai police
Of course, on arrival we couldn’t make sense of the train station and went to ask an official for an ATM. Before we knew it there were the dreaded Thai tourist police all around us. I’d visions of us being locked up and accused of something we hadn’t done. Instead they bundled me into a white police van and brought me to an ATM across town. Then we went back to the train station for my friend. In the meantime the police had found out for us that all the trains were fully booked and they brought us to the bus station where they checked before letting us out of their van that there was in fact a bus to Bangkok that night.
Before we knew it we were on a proper air conditioned bus, where there was even a bus hostess like an air hostess, serving FREE snacks and drinks and handing out blankets. Bliss. A few hours later we woke up in Bangkok, ready to get into a tuk tuk (crazy taxis) and go looking for somewhere to sleep that night.
The moral of the story
You can ‘do’ the south of Laos in a week, via Ubon and Pakse, easily. But if I was to do it all over again, I would have given it more time. Don Kong was such a beautiful island and quite near the largest waterfalls in south east Asia which we also went to see one day. When I was in that part of the world, back in March 2002, those were very quiet place, different to what I hear of Northern Laos. If I could, I’d be back in Laos in the morning. There’s something very special about the place, but you may need to be prepared to ‘rough it’.
