Ruins, Elephants, and 4000 Islands
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007My apologies for not posting recently…
Well, after leaving Kong Lor Cave we headed to the very south of Laos, where there were a few things we wanted to do. We’ve been putting off any kind of elephant trek for a while now because we thought there was a place in southern Laos that offered a less touristy and more authentic experience than doing it around Chiang Mai or Luang Prabang. In this we were partially right…
Ban Kiet Ngong is a small village about 10km off the main road heading south from Pakse. Not many independent travellers make it here (we didn’t see any), but minivan tours are starting to come to the village these days. The village is home to a number of working elephants, some of which are now taking tourists around rather than dragging logs. We stayed the night with a local family in a homestay (they spoke fewer words of English than we did of Laos, though, so it was hard to really gain much from this experience) and the next morning rode in a basket on top of one of the village elephants to the archaeological site of Phou Asa, a jungle fortress of which there is not much remaining – just a few jagged, slate-like stone towers. Still, it was a nice experience and we had the ruins to ourselves until climbing back on the elephant and heading back (a solitude that we appreciate even more now that we’re in Angkor).
After leaving the elephant village, we went to see the ruins of Wat Phou, the most celebrated Khmer ruins that exist outside of modern-day Cambodia. The place was certainly very atmospheric and we did enjoy it, though in hindsight a conversation we had with an Englishman before going summed it up almost perfectly:
Us: Is Wat Phou impressive?
Him: Have you been to Angkor?
Us: No.
Him: Then yes.
The last place of interest en route to Cambodia is the 4,000 islands, situated in the middle of the mighty Mekong, which expands to 14km wide at this point. We spent a night on two different islands, Don Khong and Don Deht, and while the latter was one of those ‘backpacker hangouts’ that we usually don’t tend to like much because people just lie around and do nothing, we took walks around both islands and enjoyed it enough.
From there it took us a day-and-a-half on mostly dreadfully organised ‘private’ transport (and rather more organised public transport) to cross the Cambodian border and get all the way to Siam Reap, during which the phrases ‘I miss Laos’ and ‘I wish we were still in Laos’ were uttered with a fair degree of frequency. But those thoughts soon vanished as we realised how close we had come to the single as-yet-unseen historical site that we wanted to visit most in the world…
Nick