Killing Time on Don Det

The first thing we encountered in Laos was some small time extortion. Before we even reached the border, in fact. The bus attendant claimed he'd take care of all our visas and stamps for $46 bucks, including only a $1 service charge. He broke the prices down and was of course lying. Everything cost $40 bucks without his "services". And that includes $4 for two stamps that we wouldn't have had to pay if we were smart and asked for receipts, because they were clearly extraneous and illegal charges.

But that's where the problems ended. All border crossings are suspect, as far as I'm concerned.

On Don Det, and island in a freshwater archipelago by the Cambodian border, we lounged about for four days, doing nothing more productive than ride bikes one day, and another day I went tubing - jumping out of a boat upstream for the sole purpose of floating back - with some other backpackers.

It's easy to do, kill time, on such an island. Our $5 bungalow was on the northern tip of the island and gave us killer views of the sun melting into reds and pinks in the sky and over the Mekong as it sunk below Cambodia. There were bars and restaurants on stilts over the river with mattresses and hammocks and diving boards lining a dirt path, the "main street" of Don Det.

All you can do is swim, sit, read, eat, drink. There are a lot of backpackers that zip over from the mainland for a few days, and a lot of places for happy shakes. Those can lay you out for a day or two if you're not careful though. Trust me, it happened to someone I know.

I tried to figure out why all the cats had docked and crooked tails. It seemed to be a feature of the island. I never found out. Maybe it was a genetic thing, a small island of inbreeding cats. Maybe dogs routinely fucked them up when they were kittens. Maybe people bent them for the hell of it, but they all had crooked tails.

They seemed happy though, those cats, and every other animal too, even the mangy dogs with swinging balls. And why not? Apart from a chicken in a domed bamboo basket with poor prospects for its immediate future, all the animals roamed free under the warm shade. There was always a breeze. The cats and dogs and water buffaloes were maybe the only creatures with an easier and lazier life than the stoned backpackers in bathing suits and yoga clothes.