It is straightforward to book tickets from Pakse to anywhere in Laos or the surrounding countries of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Several agencies offer minibus trips which mean that tedious visits to the bus station are not required. I read online that our ‘go to’ transport booking app 12go was not reliable in Laos, so we bought our tickets to Don Det from the most reputable agency in the ‘backpacker Central’ area of Pakse, Miss Noy, which is run by a Laotian woman and her French husband.

We were picked up by the minibus direct from our hotel and the air conditioned trip was comfortable. It included a ferry across the Mekong river. This was a wooden platform tacked to a long tail boat. I had reservations about the river worthiness of this vessel and during the journey scouted for land that I might be able to swim to should we sink. Happily, we arrived safely in Don Det, the most popular ‘backpacker’ island in the group of 4000 islands that are found in this area of the Mekong river. We headed to our hotel which was slightly more upmarket than many on the island, having air con and spacious rooms with balconies. A lot of the accommodation is in simple wooden huts with only a fan. With temperatures of 37 degrees outside, my priority was air con rather than rustic backpacker ambience.

We were too early to check in straight away so we wandered the streets dripping sweat in our wake. We eventually settled in a friendly cafe. The scene was old school traveller – little cafes offering fruit shakes, banana pancakes, shakshuka and a mash up of other dishes from around the world. We soon spotted that many cafes offered ‘happy’ food and drinks. Apparently these are laced with marijuana. I can’t vouch for their effect or quality as I didn’t try them, but they may explain the reclining westerners liberally scattered across cushions and hammocks throughout the island.

While we were waiting for our room to become available we got chatting to a German woman who was on the bus from Pakse with us. She could speak fluent Lao and was around 15 – 20 years older than me. She told us that she had been brought up in the GDR prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GDR had a friendship programme with Laos and she got sent over to work there and learn the language. She said that as she was so young at the time, it has stayed with her. It is apparently a very direct language. Talking to her made me think about the sort of history and politics that I learned at school and how much it missed out.

That evening we visited the reggae themed bar that no self respecting traveller destination is without. We drank beer and ate pizza. It was magical watching the moon rise above the Mekong river bathing it in silver light.

We hired bikes to tour Don Det and the neighbouring island of Don Khon. It was a relaxing way to spend the day, stopping off at cafes for refreshment when the conditions got too hot. In the time of French rule a railway was built from one end of the island to the other. As steamers could not traverse the Mekong rapids, the plan was for goods to be loaded onto trains at. Don Det and transported that way to the bottom of Don Khon where they would be re-loaded onto boats to make the last part of their journey. This turned out to be a big failure as expected demand did not materialise and the whole project was dealt a death blow by the building of a road in the 1930s. The rusting remains of the trains can still be seen on Don Khon.

Tim looked up more details about the failed railway. He found an interesting account by a physician’s wife, Marthe Bassenne. She travelled from Pnomh Penh to Luang Prabang in Laos partly via the railway. At that time the area was much more heavily forested. Her account reads: ‘The train…hauled us across the island which is covered by teak tress and bamboos…The temperature was very high and the sun, filtering through the trees roused noxious fever-vapours from the tangled undergrowth. Sweat caked my hair….the mosquitoes took advantage of my predicament to attack me as they pleased’ (this is quoted on Wikipedia from John Keay ‘Mad About the Mekong: Exploration and Empire in South East Asia’, a book that I intend to try and get hold of and read at some point).

Tim wondered if the film that Werner Herzog made ‘Fitzcarraldo’ was based on this railway. A documentary about the making of the film ‘Burden of Dreams’ does suggest some parallels with the story of the railway (although in fact the film is set in the Amazon). It seems linked to the colonial legacy and images that are linked to Indochina in the west. These are also linked to the Vietnam war. Themes of wild nature defeating the white settlers are evident.

We visited one set of rapids, which were an impressive sight, initially dropping in wide steps across a large section of river and then thundering into a narrow channel. Laos has plans for further dam building which are supported by China and opposed by other neighbouring countries. Some dams have already been built and there was a recent incident when one was breached, sweeping through a village and killing many people.

A colleague of mine at work messaged me to say she had visited Don Khon in 1997 and seen the rare Irrawaddy dolphins there. Sadly they are now extinct in Laos and the only place they can be seen is Cambodia. They are dying out there as well. If the fishermen catch one in their net, they don’t see it as viable to let a whole catch go for one dolphin. It is sad that a compensation scheme for them is not available. I guess that potential projects like this are going to become less not more viable with the recent cuts in development aid.

We met some of the first English tourists we have bumped into during our travels in Don Det. They were two women travelling together, heading towards Australia. The one that we spoke to most had been working for the probation service. I felt sad that somebody as talented and hard working as her had been burned out so young by a service that should never have been tendered out to organisations who have no experience at all of working with offenders. The situation that she had been dealing with sounded like utter chaos, She had also lost a good friend and her experiences had motivated her to travel while she is still young and healthy. I felt that she is an example of how negative events in life can sometimes lead to people making decisions that take them in a whole new exciting direction.

My final day in Don Det I was in an inexplicably grumpy mood. I did not realise that this was a forewarning of a brewing UTI, doubtless aggravated by the hot weather and cycling. I feel that it is more and more inevitable that at some point in the not too distant future I will become one of those older women who are turned completely loopy by UTIs and sadly often don’t get the treatment they need quickly enough. I will need to leave Tim and the kids clear instructions on how to deal with me.