Da Last Don (Det)

Ahhh, Don Det. I like Don Det. It's a place where you could easily spend a few weeks and drastically lower your blood pressure, take some time away from the impending collapse of the global financial market and ponder a multicolored sunset over the Mekong.


Located on the Cambodia/Laos border, Don Det is one small dot in an area known as 4,000 Islands where the Mekong branches off creating, well, thousands of small islands. Connected to the slightly larger Don Khon, Don Det has emerged as a special kind of backpacker hideout - very basic accommodation (shared flush-it-yourself-with-a-bucket toilets, electricity between 18:00 and 21:00 and cold showers) for less than 1 dollar a day.

As an aside, if anybody should travel here, be careful of bungalows with supports in the water. While seemingly innocuous, we saw some folks taking apart a building we learned had earlier collapsed with a couple of travelers inside! While neither were physically hurt, the woman was apparently in shock and the couple had all of their belongings take an unexpected swim. Here you can check out the frame.

With the influx of Western travelers, many of the farmers on the island have discovered a relatively lucrative business opportunity. This doesn't change the fact that our residence was a few meters away from any number of chickens, dogs, cats, cows and water buffalo. Grandma still ran the household, and although no English emerged through her crimson betel nut stained lips, she smiled and shooed us to a prime bungalow just the same.

We were lucky to stay on the 'sunset' side of the island, a more quiet area still just a couple hundred yards from the other side of the island where boats docked from the mainland. We had a great vantage point to check out long-tail fishing boats puttering up and down the river as well as monstrous thunderclouds bearing down on us (it is monsoon season after all).

Now 'keeping yourself busy' on an island such as this is not necessarily a priority. We woke early and went to sleep early and spent a lot of time eating, playing rummy and going for walks. This isn't to say that we were necessarily lazy, we did have a couple of very legit 'see-stuff' days - dolphin day and bike-ride day.

Dolphin day was, as you can imagine, a day where we went to see dolphins, namely the endangered Irrawaddy dolphin. Native to SE Asia, the dolphin is able to live in both fresh and salt water. Now going to spot dolphins is a risky business as we had no guarantee that they would be there when we were. Riding in a van to a launch point then taking another long tail across the river back to the Cambodian side we arrived to a smallish island with a few benches. As we were getting off the boat one of the other passengers let out an 'Oh! I saw one!' and sure enough we found a pod of 5-20 dolphins hanging out. Now these dolphins are not of the Flipper variety jumping out of the river to do tricks, but it was a special opportunity to see these big-brained mammals surfacing just a dozen yards away.

Less interesting, but still impressive was a waterfall that we stopped at as well on the way home. While not very tall at all, the falls do have the distinction of having the largest quantity of water flowing down in all of SE Asia.


Bike ride day was our attempt at making it around the circumference of both Don Det and Don Khon without taking a tumble into an irrigation ditch or a water buffalo along the way. We rented some bikes that looked suspect (that ended up being fine) and set off with our friend Joost (pronounced Yosht), a medical student from the Netherlands. The ride was fantastic if a bit bumpy and muddy, but we were lucky to have just a bit of rain as we stopped for a break. One of the highlights was a small 'beach' that we stumbled upon with some sort of crazy quicksand. If you dug your feet in and started moving around you would, unsurprisingly, start to sink. Even more fun was jumping around in a small circle and creating a sort of trampoline/divot depression area.

I'm not feeling particularly able to do justice to just how beautiful the ride was amd this post is already overdue, but I hope that the pics will help. I'll just say that as nice as it may appear on the monitor, it was even more beautiful in person.