Southern Laos and the four thousand islands of the Mekong

Most visitors to Laos see only the north: Luang Prabang, Vang Vieng and the capital, Vientiane. The south is much less visited, and it has some of the most memorable landscapes in the country. Here the Mekong, swollen by its long journey from Tibet, flows through a broad, flat valley between the mountains of the Annamite range and the Thai border, before it reaches Cambodia. And in the far south, it does something extraordinary.

Si Phan Don

Just before the Cambodian border, the Mekong spreads out across a vast area of rock, sand and forest, dividing into countless channels around a maze of islands. In the wet season the river here can be well over ten kilometres wide. The Lao call the area Si Phan Don, the four thousand islands. Many of them are no more than rocks or sandbars that appear in the dry season. Others are large enough to have villages, rice fields and palm groves.

A few of the islands, notably Don Det and Don Khon, have become popular with visitors for their laid-back pace: hammocks, bicycles, riverside guesthouses, sunsets over the water. The two islands are linked by a bridge that is a relic of the colonial era. In the 1890s, the French built a short railway across the islands to carry boats and cargo around the falls, the only railway in Laos until the twenty-first century. Its old bridge and a rusting locomotive still stand.

The falls

The islands lie just above the point where the Mekong plunges over a series of rocky ledges as it drops from the Lao plateau to the Cambodian plains. Khone Phapheng is the largest of the falls, a broad, thunderous cascade, and by volume of water it is the largest waterfall in South-east Asia. It is the reason the Mekong could never be used as a continuous waterway into China, as the French had hoped. Li Phi, also known as Somphamit, is another great set of falls on the far side of Don Khon. A small population of Irrawaddy dolphins once lived in a deep pool on the Cambodian border below the falls, but on the Lao side they are now rarely, if ever, seen.

Wat Phou and the Bolaven Plateau

Further upriver, near the town of Champasak, lies Wat Phou, a ruined Khmer temple on the slopes of a mountain above the Mekong. It is older than Angkor Wat. Parts of the site date back to the fifth century, and most of the surviving buildings to the eleventh and twelfth. A processional way leads up the hillside through ruined palaces to a sanctuary below a cliff and a sacred spring. The temple and its landscape are a World Heritage Site, and its setting, with views over the plain, is beautiful.

East of the river, the Bolaven Plateau rises to about a thousand metres, cool and green, with coffee plantations, waterfalls and villages of ethnic minority peoples. Coffee was introduced by the French in the early twentieth century, and the plateau's coffee is now one of Laos's main exports. Tad Fane, a pair of waterfalls plunging into a deep gorge, is one of the most dramatic sights.

Pakse, the main town of the south, is a busy market town at the meeting of the Mekong and the Xe Don, and the usual base for the plateau and Wat Phou. Its riverside cafés are a good place to watch the evening traffic of boats.

Explore Worldwide's Spirit of Laos and Cambodia, fifteen nights, takes in the whole length of Laos. Its places include Luang Prabang, Pakbeng and Oudomxay in the north and Vientiane. In the south they include Pakse, the Bolaven Plateau with the Tad Fane falls and Pakxong, Champasak and the island of Don Daeng, Don Khon, and Stung Treng across the border in Cambodia.

Explore Worldwide's Jewels of Indochina, twenty-six nights, combines northern Laos with Vietnam and Cambodia, from Vientiane, Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang to Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.

The cool, dry season, from about November to February, is the most comfortable time to visit. From March the heat builds, and the rains arrive around June.