Si Phan Don

The islands owe their shape to the Khone falls, the barrier of rapids at the southern end where the Mekong drops out of Laos. The falls made this stretch a frontier for centuries: boats could not pass, so goods were carried around them, and the villages lived from fishing, rice and the traffic that stopped here. The area lay within the Lao kingdom of Champasak, which came under Siamese control in the late 18th century.

French gunboats forced the issue in the 1890s. After taking the east bank of the Mekong in 1893, France tried to open the river as a trade route to China and found the falls impassable. A first line was laid across Don Khon in 1893 and a permanent narrow-gauge railway was in place by 1897; in the 1910s it was carried over a bridge to Don Det, making a portage line of about seven kilometres with piers at each end, where steamers unloaded and reloaded. It was the first railway in Laos and the only one until 2009. The last train is reported to have run in 1940; the bridge, embankments and a locomotive remain.

After 1975 the islands were a quiet corner of the new republic, living from fishing and farming. Travellers began arriving in numbers in the 1990s, and simple bungalows spread along the banks of Don Det and Don Khon, bringing guesthouses and a cash income to villages that had little of either. The Don Sahong dam, on the Hou Sahong channel just above the Cambodian border and operating since January 2020, has been the great local controversy: Cambodia, Vietnam and civil society groups objected to it through the Mekong River Commission, chiefly over its effect on the fish that the river's communities depend on.

Life here is village life on water. Households are organised around fishing, rice and family, the temple is the centre of each village, and the Buddhist calendar sets the year: alms rounds at dawn, ordinations in the dry season, and the end of Lent in October, when candle-lit floats are pushed out onto the Mekong and long boats race in front of Muang Khong. The southern Lao spoken on the islands is close to the speech of north-east Thailand.

Fishing traditions are unusually elaborate, because the falls create channels where fish concentrate. Villagers build bamboo traps and platforms into the rapids at Li Phi, repair them each season, and time their work to the migrations that move up and down the river. Irrawaddy dolphins once lived in the deep pool near the Cambodian border and were a point of local pride, though the species has been extinct in Laos since 2022.

Visitors have been part of the picture for thirty years, and the islands hold two rhythms at once: guesthouse bars and hammocks on one bank, a farming village with a monastery on the other. Islanders are tolerant of this but expect visitors to cover up away from the river and to keep noise down after dark. Greetings are made with palms together at the chest, shoes come off at a doorway, and voices stay low.

Only a few thousand people live on the main visited islands, within the wider Khong district that takes in the islands and part of the mainland bank to the east. Don Khong, which has nineteen villages, holds the seat of administration, the schools and the offices; Don Det and Don Khon live largely from guesthouses, restaurants and boats; the smaller islands are farming communities reached only by local boat.

Days start before dawn with nets and traps, alms for the monks, and the morning market at Nakasang or Muang Khong, and most work is done before the heat of the middle of the day. Families grow rice, keep buffalo, chickens and gardens of banana and coconut, and sell fish and vegetables across the water. Electricity arrived on the main islands in stages during the 2000s and 2010s, and mobile signal and internet are now normal, if patchy.

The pressures are those of a place that depends on one river and one trade. Catches have fallen, and dams upstream and at Don Sahong are blamed for changes in water level and fish numbers; the seasonal flood can damage paths and low bungalows; and younger islanders often leave for work in Pakse or across the border in Thailand. Tourism brings money but concentrates it on two islands, and the arrival of better roads and the bridge routes to Cambodia has slowly changed who stops here and for how long.

The Mekong is the larder. Fish is eaten at nearly every meal: grilled whole over charcoal as ping pa, minced into laap pa with lime, chilli, herbs and toasted rice powder, steamed in banana leaf with dill and lemongrass as mok pa, or simmered in a sour soup. Smaller fish are fried crisp and eaten whole, and pa daek, the fermented fish paste that gives Lao cooking its depth, is made in jars in the villages. Everything is eaten with sticky rice, rolled into a ball by hand from a woven basket.

Beside it comes tam mak hoong, green papaya pounded with chilli, lime, garlic, palm sugar and fish paste, often fiercer here than versions served to visitors in the towns. Grilled chicken, bamboo shoot soup and stir-fried morning glory fill out a family meal, and jungle herbs and river weed appear in season. Breakfast is feu, a rice noodle soup with a plate of herbs, or khao jii, the baguette inherited from the French, split and filled.

Guesthouse kitchens add fruit shakes, fried rice, sandwiches and Western dishes for long-staying travellers, and the bars pour Beerlao by the bottle at sunset. Bolaven coffee from the plateau north-east of the islands is drunk strong and sweet over condensed milk, and lao-lao, the home-distilled rice spirit, comes out at weddings and festivals.