THE FIRST THING I want to do when I get to the Tad Fane Resort in southern Laos is to look at the waterfall. Never mind that I can hear it from my cabin, its roar overpowering the midday screech of cicadas. Never mind that I can see the top of it from the restaurant. I want the full treatment: an uninterrupted view of twin torrents sluicing over a 120-metre cliff from jungle-clad plateau to rocky riverbed. Never mind that the mud path leading into the chasm descends a 45-degree slope.
I persuade a resort guide to lead me down through the jungle, further and further, until we realise that what we are about to step on to is not solid land. It is simply thick foliage, with a few pinpricks of light winking a warning that it's time to give up. There's no sign of the bottom of the falls. Three hours and an upstream river crossing later, we're back at the top. A raging arch of water cascades over the edge then disappears into the chasm. Below us are sheer cliffs, curving round to form an enormous, open-sided cylinder. Their faces are a vivid green, soft and velvety with fresh foliage and shivering with tiny waterfalls behind a cloud of spray. The bottom is no more visible than before. But from here, we can see where we were standing earlier in the day. Patches of jungle slope down from the plateau to a sheer drop. A few steps more or a wrong footing on the mud, and we really would have seen the bottom.
Tad Fane is at the edge of the Bolaven plateau, a volcanic slab that sheds water like a wrung sponge in the middle of southern Laos. The French once grew coffee here, and now the Lao do the same. Three friends join the guide and me on a four-hour hike later that afternoon and those coffee trees come in handy: we haul ourselves up by their sinuous branches. There are fig and guava trees, wild ginger plants with scented, red cone-shaped flowers, pomelos lying on the ground, and a strangler fig wrapped around the dead trunk of its former host. And there are leeches, hundreds of them, little brown monsters that stand on dripping leaves, waving as if in greeting, before attaching themselves to a passing leg.
We stop at Tad Nyeung, a 40-metre cascade that drenches us with spray. On top of the falls, the water is surprisingly calm, and we jump in for a swim. I discover two leech bites on my foot, bleeding profusely. Our guide offers some leaves he's picked in the forest. 'This will stop the bleeding,' he says, as he applies the leaves to the bites; they dry up within seconds. Southern Laos is that kind of place: alive, wet, and filled with stunning beauty, sudden dangers, slight discomforts and overwhelming consolations.
We arrive back at the resort in time to see a peach- and crimson-streaked sunset peeking through the forest that encloses the half circle of seven eco-friendly wooden cabins, then guzzle Beerlao and spring rolls and sit round the campfire in the surprising chill of the night air. It's time to move south.
At Nakasang a long-tailed boat picks us up from a strip of stilt houses and rips out into the Mekong River. This is Siphandon, a 50km archipelago of 4,000 islands in the Mekong. After the brief adventure at Tad Fane, it is time to relax. Dense, formless jungle gives way to palm-fringed shores, then an odd sight emerges: a concrete arched railway bridge similar to those in provincial Europe. We alight in its shadow, on an island called Don Khone. There's no electricity supply on Don Khone, no cars and no phones. Just a few restaurants, some dollar-a-night cabins, a couple of nicer guesthouses and a row of old French buildings in varying states of repair. It is, however, home to one colonial oddity - the only railway line built in Laos. It ran for just 10km across Don Khone and over the bridge to the island of Don Det. The operation closed in 1945 after 30 years.