9. Cycling for pleasure

The next leg of the trip was through a remote agricultural landscape with only 1 town and few villages or places to eat and almost no shade.

The one potential stop was a fleapit mentioned earlier and we didn’t know if we could manage a hilly 140km cycle to miss it. The lack of shade and of course being into the wind wasn’t appealing.

So after a long discussion (who are we kidding!) we decided we didn’t want to cycle just for the sake of cycling. And we also fancied being in Phnom Penh for Christmas for a nut roast – I kid you not!

So, we hired a car and driver to skip the fleapit, wind and hills and rolled up at the Laos border late afternoon having saved 3 days cycling.

This will give us some more time on the Mekong and a reserve day to get to the Cambodian capital in time for Santa.

The border crossing is remote, big buildings, lots of staff and hardly a passenger anywhere. When we crossed there was just a car load of people and a Spanish cyclist who looked like he hadn’t washed his clothes since the millennium, but it was just the red dirt that is thrown up non stop on the non tarmac roads.

The Border crossing into Laos gets awful reviews – corruption, aggressive rude staff, so naturally we found it all very well organised, very polite and efficient and were though and into Laos in about 25 minutes.

I’ve no idea whether the fees they charge are legitimate, but all the prices are stuck on notices so we just smiled and paid them. We had read people spending an hour arguing about the $2 stamping fee after presumably having spent £600 on flying out here, anyway, we were in, so celebrated sitting on a bench and had some cheese and crackers breaking out our reserve cheddar from the fridge… Wonderful!

We had arrived much earlier than we thought we would and had booked a hotel nearby to the border, but in fact could have cycled on to the ferry to our destination island of Don Det. But hey ho….The roads were almost totally deserted, with only the occasional moped and hardly any cars at all and rather surprisingly more cows than we’ve seen on the whole of our trip so far combined. The place heaved with them and it felt a bit odd to be watched by hundreds of cows and no people. A zombie apocalypse ride.

As we had so much time we stopped off at the Khone Papheng waterfall park and had a ice cream as we sat for the first time by the Mekong – this gigantic meandering river around Don Det has a number of waterfalls making it impassable to boats. The amount of water passing over these falls is enormous and the info boards compared the series of falls to Niagara and Victoria falls.

We headed on to our hotel past what looked a very poor Laos, so when we saw our hotel we almost fell off Tilly. The massive brand new complex lining the river wouldn’t have looked out of place in Vegas. The interior was extremely stylish/brash and the corridors were lined with life sized photos of life in Laos. It felt totally out of place in what we had so far seen of Laos.

Our room overlooked the Mekong and was enormous with an indented wood panel ceiling and more local life photos. It was sumptuous to say the least. But the place was deserted – perhaps there really is a zombie apocalypse – and there appeared to be just 4 other guests, in a 100 room hotel.

We parked Tilly in the foyer and the staff then showed us the dinner menu and got Frank the chef up to help us find something  he could make us that was vegetarian. They couldn’t have been more helpful or friendly – we loved our overnight there feeling very pampered and spoilt, all for less than the cheapest deals at a premier inn !

The next day we dragged ourselves out of the comfiest bed we’ve had in ages – they seem to like to sleep on concrete here – and rode the short ride onto the ferry to Don Det.

Ferry is stretching the word to breaking point. There’s a series of long tail boats that ply back and forth across the Mekong taking the hordes of tourists.

The ticket office was full of ‘back packers’. They really need to be renamed as they now all seem to have an absolutely massive backpack and also a front pack too that’s about the size of a rucksack from my youth. Most had far more luggage than us, on their own, and some of them looked like they may die on the walk down to the ferry. If they fell overboard they’d just sink!

But Tilly had her own ferry – none of the backpackers mixing with us royalty! And we zoomed across to Don Det and hippysville.

The village is just full of gap year backpackers, smoking, drinking and walking about like they were in a shanty town version of Benidorm. It felt, to us, a bit embarrassing and many weren’t good ambassadors for Europe. Every shack sold burgers (pumpkin burger for veggies) pizzas and full English. There was even an English shack selling Kellogs Shreddies for £10!

We weren’t struck on the place so the next day cycled around the islands which was much quieter and nicer, seeing the remains of French Colonialism and their tiny railway that they built to bypass the waterfalls. They even used to put the river steamers on the trains!

And anything they built is still standing and looking solid. Not so much anything else though. We visited more waterfalls which were incredibly spectacular and opted out of joining the fun seekers on the zip lines going over them in multiple directions and had a wonderful day away from Benidorm.

Fortunately our hotel was tucked away from the village and had a deck we could watch the sun go down into the Mekong….(if it hadn’t been pissing down!) and we did enjoy our stay there with Andy the Swiss owner looking after us and about 2 other guests.  Away from the main backpacker streets, things seem very quiet everywhere.

We left the islands behind on the same ferry as our fellow Spanish cycle tourer we’d met at the border – who now looked squeaky clean. He was heading for the mountains in the north and we turned and headed back to the border for our journey south.

As we’d enjoyed it so much on our way up, we stayed another night in the Vegas hotel which was busier this time with a coach of Chinese people. In fact the hotel is built, owned and largely staffed by Chinese. We had to speak (Google translate !) Chinese rather than Lao and of course there was a Karaoke in the evening, that brought the tone down a bit!

So after a very fleeting visit we returned to Cambodia thinking another future trip may be in order to see more of Laos sometime.