On this page you can read about our adventure during the boat trip from Pakse to Khong Island. The boat was too heavy and was too slow. This meant that we didn’t reach our destination before it was dark. The boat was then halted by the side of the Mekong during the night and we were told to fend for ourselves. There wasn’t even a dock to step out of the boat and mosquitos were starting to eat us alive. That’s when you realize that a village like that is cute when you’re looking at it, but it’s very hard to actually live in…

'Idyllic villages': Fun to live in for awhile?

As a tourist you can take a boat over the Mekong from Pakse to Khong Island. This trip takes about 7 hours if all goes well. It’s a beautiful trip! You see amazing villages by the shores. Often you hear tourists responding to these in an ecstatic way and they’d love to live there for awhile. These ideas need to be adjusted sometimes though. A chance arrives when it turns out the boat is overloaded and is going too slow. The boat won’t arrive today. What now?

On shore through the sludge

So you can spend a night in one of those idyllic villages, which must be awesome! A friendly Laotian invites you to spend the night in his village. The perfect opportunity to take a look around. A dodgy canoe takes you from the boat to the shore, exciting but still fun. The fun stops soon when you step out of the canoe in the middle of the night and straight into the sludge on the shore. Then you have to climb up the shore. You now realize how dark the night can be!

Dinner with a Laotian family

Then it starts raining and you’re starting to get very cold in your wet clothes. You’re hustled into a building, up the stairs and end up in an almost empty house. There’s no furniture, everybody is sitting on the floor with crossed legs. There’s no electricity. Gasoline lamps give off a tiny light. The food is sticky rice, which isn’t bad to eat but is very boring, so you test the dip sauce which is served with the rice. Your hunger starts to fade when you smell it and when you hear how it was made. Pieces of fish with everything on them have been lying in salty water for months. That’s the basic ingredient for the sauce. These tropical temperatures have given it a special aroma; it smells very sour now too. So you leave the sauce in peace and just eat the rice.

It’s raining and there’s no toilet

When you’ve settled down and are rested, you’d like to take a bath and retreat on the toilet. There is no toilet, so you go outside. In the pitch-black night and in the rain you don’t walk too far away from the house to find a tree behind which you can do your deed. It’s very unhygienic, because you’re not the only one going to the toilet this way. But you really need to go, so you don’t pay attention to facts. Toilet paper is too expensive for poor people, but twigs and leaves will work too. Imagine this: we actually ended up with one of the wealthier families and we still have to deal with this!

Worms that swim in your blood

So a bath is next. You try and find out how they do that by using gestures. The locals take a bath in the Mekong River when it’s still light. There’s no bathroom. And you don’t feel like going back to the sludge on the shore in the dark. So you take a nap. You get the hosts mattress and there’s probably a mosquito net available, your host will sleep without it for one night. Your sleeping location is not what you’d like it to be. Later you hear that it was a good thing you didn’t bathe in the Mekong. The chance of contracting bilharzia (a worm that swims around in your blood for years and then slowly destroys your liver) would have been very large. 

Lots to think about…

After an experience like this the life in such an idyllic ‘paradise’ seems to have an entirely new side to it, especially when you hear that the life expectation of the locals is about 50 years. That’s more than 20(!) years less than in Holland. Some villages have a child death rate of 20%.