Around the world with 12 kgs: A piece of Finland

Pakse is a really small town, and we were there only beacuse of the nearby waterfalls. We spent a day visiting the two waterfalls. We had to take a local bus there, which was an experience itself as we had no idea where we had to get off and it didn't help that nobody in the whole bus spoke English. Fortunately everybody else in the bus knew where we should get off and they pretty much threw us out of the bus after spending the whole busride staring at our fair skin, blond hair and blue eyes. When we came back to Pakse, we thought we knew where we were and decided to walk to our hotel. It wasn't a good idea! It was dark and we didn't even remember the name of our hotel :) We assumed that everything would be near in a small town like Pakse. There are three different bus stations in Pakse and cos we had already visited two of them, we assumed we had arrived to the bus station close to our hotel (cos it looked really similar). We started walking around (probably in circles) and even though we had a map we had trouble finding the right street as the streets had no English names. At one point we were quite sure we had arrived in a wrong city as nothing
looked familiar to us. :) Luckily after wandering aroung for about an hour, we finally found people who spoke English and they showed us the way to our hotel.

Tad Lo waterfalls

After Pakse we took another bus to Si Phan Don (four thousand islands). The scenery was almost like back home in Finland. The place also reminded us of Finland because it was like walking into a sauna, we were literally sweating our asses off! The first island where we stayed at, Don Khong, was really peaceful and quiet and there wasn't really anything to do there. So we decided to go tanning on the riverside of Mekong. Just when we thought we had found the perfect place to relax, tan and swim, three big water buffalos joined us and went swimming/peeing next to us. Lovely! :)

One of the waterbuffalos interrupting our sunbathing

Beacuse Don Khong was too quiet for us, we only stayed there for one night and took a boat to a backpacker island called Don Det the next morning. This was a lovely little island with more to do. We stayed in a cute little guesthouse (which only cost us about 4 euros) which accomodated only us and three gay couples. We decided to rent bicycles to explore the island. This ended up being a lot of fun and we just cycled into "town" when we had nothing else to do. We also cycled to another island called Don Khon which is connected to Don Det by an old french bridge. We went dolphin watching there and spotted three Irrawaddy doplhins. The doplhins are really rare and only about 20 doplhins live in this area, so we were really lucky to see them. We also went to see some waterfalls (again) on Don Khon. This time Lili couldn't really appreciate the waterfalls becuse of the heat and the fact that she just wanted to jump in even though it was forbidden to swim in the waterfalls. The last day on Don Det we went tubing which was really relaxing. We were floating in the river in a huge inner tube and letting the stream take us forward.