4,000 Islands, or Si Phan Don in Lao, is a a river archipelago in Southern Laos at the Cambodian border. While there may not actually be 4,000 islands, there are a lot of them, many uninhabited, really small, or even covered in water when the Mekong River floods.

Currently the only islands with tourism infrastructure, such as accommodation and restaurants, are Don Det, Don Khong and Don Khon. 4,000 Islands is pretty out of the way, so it sees less travelers than Luang Prabang or Vang Vieng, but still gets a steady stream of those looking to relax, cruise on bikes, take chill boat rides and watch sunsets from riverside bars. If you didn’t already get the picture, everything is slow here, and chill, very chill.

What immediately fascinated me about this place was the intimate look into the lives of Laotian locals. We were there in the low season, so it helped that there weren’t many tourists and locals were more likely to be going about their lives outside of the tourist industry. We saw kids going to school, swimming in the river, families gathering in their yards, fixing their homes and businesses, tending to livestock and harvesting rice.

We happened to arrive at the start of the rice harvest, and having a close look into this was incredible. We all eat rice, but how many of us know how it actually gets to our table?

While in Japan working on a farm a couple months earlier I had planted rice, but didn’t get to see it mature and harvest, so catching the final days of the process was helpful for completing the story for me.