Wonderful Mekong

Back to civilisation today. After four days on my tour I came back to Pakse this afternoon. My blog will be a bit longer today.. and I really do not know how to select the things I share with you.

The tour was great, also due to my personal tourguide Say. In the end, nobody else joined for the 3 last days of the tour and so I was all alone with him. The first day, a German woman of about 50 - her name is Carmen - joined for the elephant riding and the visit of Wat Phou Champasak (another Unesco-world heritage site since 2001 because of its unique position dominating the Mekong valley and its particular Khmer style). The ruins are in very bad shape and are falling apart, although an Italian archeologist is working with her team already since 1990. On one of the reliefs over an entrance to one of the temples, there was a picture of a man giving birth to two kids. When explaining this, our guide, who taught Lao-History in school for two tears before he gave it up because of the very poor salary of 20 dollars, seriously asked us whether we believe that in former times, man could give birth. When we were a bit surprised about the question (first we thought it was a joke...) he told us that he believed that this was the case. Otherwise, why should it be depicted on this stone ?? We wondered what Lao children learn during history classes....

The funny thing is that Carmen lives in Bretten, a little town in South-West Germany, around 5 km from where my sister lives. We had a good day together, especially on the elephant, whose name was Khon. Riding an elephant is all but comfortable (actually it is extremely bumpy, especially when Khon thougth he had to do some jogging downhill... In the evening I stayed ion a nice guesthouse with river-view, where I met a kind of German guy I would not like to meet neither in Germany nor elsewhere - and his name was... Juergen ! (What an honour...) He is the owner of a newspaper / cigarette / lottery shop in the Ruhr area and since he rented out the shop he can afford travelling for months. He goes where beer is cheap and annoys other Germans (and probably also other people) around the world.

The three other days we went down to the Si Phan Don (the four thousand islands), where the Mekong has hundreds of small and tiny islands just before the border to Cambodia. Especially kayaking was lots of fun. However, the "mighty Mekong" - as the people call it here - stroke back: When getting into the water from a rock, I hurt one of my toes and it hurts quite a bit and it is blue. I just hope that it is not broken (no reason to worry though.. if it does not get better, I will see a doctor. For the moment I will tape it and will not move it).

It was a very good idea to travel a part of the river on the kayak, since you experience the river much better. The river is the centre of life to most of the people here. Most people do not have water in their houses, so they wash themselves and their laundry in the river. In the early morning - yes, you might not believe it, but I became a kind of an early bird here - everybody is out for a bath in the river. Kids play in the water all day..

Tourists very rarley go on the kayak here in the south and that's why along the river, people were quite excited so see me and Say on that orange boat, with a life jacket on !! Especially the children were always waving, shouting "falang, falang" (means "foreigner" in laotian) in order to alert their friends, which then came running down to the riverside and all together were shouting "Sabaidee" - which means "hello" . Unfortunately, I could not always wave back to them, since otherwise we would never have arrived. I tried at least to shout a friendly "sabaidee" back.

On the kayak we could also go on parts of the river where motorboats are not allowed and we came across extremely beautiful spots. I was particularly impressed by the elegant movements with which the fishermen threw their samll nets out in the water. I could not get enough of it. And, by the way, the fish really tastes great!! Especially if prepared by my guide Say as an imporvised Laotian barbecue on the most bequtiful little island we could find along the way, where we just stopped and had lunch oen day. He collected the wood, made the fire, washewd the fish that we had bought from a fisherman, and cut a bit of bamboo in order to put the fish on to grill it. He just added a little bit of salt and taste was fabulous !!

I stayed on Don Kon (Don means Island), a very peaceful island, and had a nice little bungalow with a little balcony on a quiet side arm of the river with a view on the railway-bridge (!!) from Don Kon to Don Det, built by the French. The Lao just ripped off the tracks and use this now as a bridge for bikes, motorbikes and very small local taxis. A rusty engine / locomotive stands there as a witness of the French idea of using the Mekong as a river-highway of their Indochina-colonies. On either end of the railway, they built a harbour terminal with cranes, all of this now completely in ruins. Don Det, on the other hand, is more of a Hippie-paradise, with dread-locked people around the globe drinking Beerlao and Laolao (in case you forgot or did not read my blog attentively enough: this is the local rice-whiskey) ans smoking Marihuana (yes, this is tolerated and available here). You can even get all kind of "happy" things here, a happy cocktail or happy pizza, which means that they add marihuana to it (just for the ones of you with second thoughts: I did NOT try it...).

This morning, we went kayaking close to the Cambodian border, where there is still a very small population of Irrawaddy-dolphins. Unfortunately, I only saw one and only for a very short time. Experts say that this polulation will be extinguished in the next year as the fishermen still put their nets in this area in such a way which does not allow the dolphins to escape. Locals regret this, but they do not seem to see the need to change fishing practice (well, actually, the EU's common fisheries policy is not that effective either as regards the protection of mammals.. but this is another story..)

I think this should be enough for today: I do not want to bore you with all this and will rather try to upload some pictures.

WELL, I did whatever stupid mistake and all my pictures from the last 4 days got erased from the memory card and I cannot recover them anymore... I really don't know what happened.. sorry, guys...