well, it's been a while, so there's a lot to catch up on, so you'll have to excuse me if i breeze through certain memories to bring us up to speed.
last i wrote, we were in pakse, a town with nothing to do. as predicted in the last blog, we did nothing that day but kill time waiting for the sun to set. fortunately, we found a nice rooftop bar to play cards and watch it happen, making for quite a lovely evening, really.
the next morning we set out early for tad lo, a village two hours away known for its waterfalls and little else. you can imagine what we did there (spoiler: we went to the waterfalls). there were three in all, and they were quite beautiful, and to be perfectly honest, i'm not growing the least bit tired of taking three hour hikes through the blistering heat to bathe on top of a enormous waterfall overlooking the countryside of laos, but in case our readers are growing tired of hearing about it, i don't think any further details are necessary.
after two days in tad lo, we headed back to the pakse bus station to catch a bus to champasak. champasak is a tiny, one-road town that sits in the shadow of some 11th century kmher ruins. the ruins are gorgeous, climbing up the side of a small mountain, eventually coming to a dramatic panorama of the town below. we spent a good two hours at the top, sitting on a thousand year old wall, just rattling off the ways of lucky we are.
after champasak, we made our way down to si phan don, also known as the 4000 islands, an archipelago set in a massive bulge in the mekong river. the islands don't boast many activities but lounging, so we thought we would stay just one or two nights, but we immediately fell in love with our island and settled in for longer than expected. our main source of entertainment became a daily bike ride, starting a few hours before the sun set, slowly bumping along dirt paths that passed through tiny villages and rice paddies. the people on this island live so simply, that it would be easy to confuse it for poverty, when it's almost the opposite. it's true that they dont have much, but they dont seem to need much. the river gives them fish, and a place to bathe and relaxe. their houses are typically one room stilted structures made from wood and thatch that fit everyone in the family and the islands are covered with rice, papayas, chilies, and other vegetables. generally, they seem like happy people, with more free time than most people i know at home. for three nights in a row we rode around the north end of the island exhchanging smiles with the locals, not wanting the day to end.
that was until this one night...
we made a slight mistake in our calculations. before we left pakse we didn't think through how much money we would need for an extended stay in the islands, and a bus ticket to cambodia, and whatever fees we would have to pay at the border, and unfortunately for us, there were no atms on the islands. by the time we bothered to figure it out (our last day there), we realized that we had enough money to get us across the border to cambodia, but not to the city we wanted to go to, and only if we left our nice bungalow ($9) and checked into a cheaper one ($4), and cut our daily food budget to about $3 each.
so we traded in our lovely little riverside guesthouse for a wooden shack and set about our day. for our last night we couldnt afford the $2 to rent bikes, so we walked through the villages instead, before seeking out the cheapest meal on the island. we found a place that did two bowls of soup and two pieces of bread for under $3, so we made ourselves comfortable adn whittled away a night without beer. the whole island only has electricity between 6 and 10, so at 9:30 we paid our bill and headed to our new digs to get set up before lights out, and here's where it gets ugly.
when i opened the door to our room, there on the floor, is the biggest spider we've seen in two months. i'll kill most bugs, but for whatever reason, i don't like to kill spiders, so after whisking ashley out the door, i thought about how to whisk the spider out after her. when i bent over to move it, next to my head on the wall, i see the biggest centipede i have ever seen. it's a bad start to the night. not wanting to alarm ashley, i grab a broom and ask her to move her bag away from the doorway so i can sweep them both out. as she grabs for it, a cockroach falls out. we had, it seems, checked into the temple of doom.
ashley screams, which brings our british neighbor rushing over, where he finds ashley shuddering on the balcony, and me smashing the centipede into oblivion. with his help, a five minute sweep of the room found a dozen more cockroaches, two dead, most in our bed and mattress. keep in mind that as bad as this situation is, in fifteen minutes its going to get much, much worse when the lights go out. so there we stood, on our veranda, mulling over our limited options: we could both sleep outside in hammocks on the balcony... not going to work. the hammocks are terrible and miniature, i wouldnt sleep one second. we could take apart the whole bed and put it back together on the balcony... equally stupid. if there are bugs inside, where we at leasty have a mosquito net, there will certainly be bugs outside. with minutes to go, i ran back to our first guesthouse, and in pidgin laos, begged the owner to let us have our old room at a discount. maybe it was the pity she felt in watching a grown man trying to mime a cockroach crawling around, but just as the island got dark, she agreed. i have been lucky enough to stay at a four seasons hotel many times (thanks nicole) but never has a room felt so posh as when we crawled into our bed that night, after our near-stay at the mola ram guesthouse (google it).
which brings us to yesterday. we loaded up on our daily rations of water, bananas, and bread and rode thirteen hours through the border of laos, and into cambodia. as i mentioned, we could only afford a ticket to a city in the middle of nowhere called kampong cham, but our driver didn't notice when we didnt get off with the others, so we bypassed that and carried on to pnomh penh, our actual destination. we've done absolutely nothing since we got here, except check into a very clean room the size of an airplane hanger, and now use the internet. but it seems like a vibrant city, more modern than we expected, so we're sure to have more stories by the next time we write.
till then...