Xepon, Laos on Google Maps

When I arrived in Xepon, Laos 🇱🇦 I already knew the area to a certain extent although I never stayed here before. It's because I used to travel along the main road of this area on buses from/to Vietnam in the 2010s. It was always hot there, the reddish earth was parched, and withered vegetation was covered with red dust. As it turned out, the rainy season in Xepon is just as extreme.

I came from Bangkok at the end of May, and, after having several partly cloudy days, experienced rains to the full extent: it was two weeks of drizzles, showers, and downpours for two weeks.

Xepon Town in June, the street I walk every day

From the point of physical comfort, it was great. +24°C (75°F) at night is bliss after the hot season in Bangkok (where I lived without AC in addition). I remember I woke up there, couldn't sleep because of the heat, and checked weather on Google. Google said it was +31 but "feels like +39". It was at 4 am and, for sure, the room was hotter.

But sitting indoors locked by the weather is tough mentally especially if the place is new to you and calling to be explored... I spent all days in Internet, and the further, the less productive I was...

Exploring Banghiang River Banks

This is how it was. On May 30, I headed to explore Banghiang River. I already told about such a walk but that was another location at the same river.

But the road was the same. Several houses on the way, just the only dog with slight excess of aggression but no problem - my bamboo stick is always with me during walks in Xepon. 😎

Following the gravel road for half an hour, turning right and hiking along a path to the river... and another half an hour on sands and boulders upstream...

So, this is what I eventually found:

I literally discovered this place because there are currently only three images of Xepon's vicinity on Google maps. Travel guides are silent about the whole area either. I even searched images on Facebook in Lao language, like ເມືອງເຊໂປນ or ເຊໂປນ - almost nothing.

So, in such areas, I look at Google satellites to find curious places and, then, set out to check what's there, if there is a path or just a wall of tropical vegetation, etc.

I loved the scenery and the sky but the rocks were in the deep shade. I decided to come back in the morning to see them being better lit...

Lost in Jungle 😆

I didn't want to walk along the same path back to the hotel. Thanks to Google satellites, I knew about an alternative path...

Long story short, the jungle path led along a stream with marshy shores and, finally, to the dead end, a ravine with 5-meter-tall sheer walls and a waterfall at its end: 😄

I can't say I totally lost my way. I could come back to the river trail... But too much time passed, and I started worrying: twilight was falling while I had to walk back to hotel along the river, jumping from one boulder to another in the darkness...

I was rushing through tropical thickets with red mud on my soaked sneakers and bleeding scratched legs when I stumbled upon a Lao family. Sabaidee! This is how people say hello in Laos. I told them "Xepon" and, taking into account my appearance and wild eyes, they easily understood what I wanted.

Eventually, it turned out they had a car parked on the gravel road where I had wanted to reach and failed...

The wife left the frame and these are the rest of the crew:

When we were in the car returning to Xepon, it started to rain... What luck it was, to meet these people in a deserted forest! Two weeks later, I dug into these places again and did not meet a single living soul except for dragonflies and butterflies.

When It Finally Stopped Raining 😁

On June 14 😁, I continued the exploration of the area. I didn't manage to see sunny morning there but I could research the details by photographing vegetation and insects.

The same gravel road first. Can't say the landscape has a great wow-effect there but there is something charming in it, for sure.

And a familiar (to me) turn to the river:

Dragonflies Mimicing Flowers

There are a lot of colorful insects in rainy season in Xepon! And no surprise: rains return nature to life; plants grow luxuriant branches, many of them bloom these days.

Plenty of butterflies but I was impressed with dragonflies the most.

Intense magenta!

This dragonfly probably pretends to be a flower. Indeed, birds mostly eat fruits and insects, not flowers... At the same time, that camouflage is an opportunity to cheat dragonfly's prey. Some winged critters can even land on such a lovely flower...

Another dangerous "flower", a burgundy one this time:

When I appeared, she froze in this position (instead of flying away) and, thus, confirmed my hypothesis that she was mimicing vegetation.

By the way, the magenta dragonfly sat in the same position most time, with wings down. Unusual...

One more chitinous pretender:

A "withered twig" right above brownish water of the river (that beige background is actually blurred water).

Another beauty:

I don't know what this dragonfly wants to look like but I loved those huge hinder pair of wings - an unusual appearance reminiscent of old-time biplanes.

Beetles and Ants, Collaboration

Friendship between ants and aphids is well-known so, when I saw a crowd of ants and beetles together on a plant, I knew what to search for in their relationships - symbiosis or commensalism.

Leaf 1. Two holes at the base of a plant leaf. A beetle is drinking sap from one, and nobody is drinking from another.

Leaf 2. Another leaf. Here, ants are present, one of them is drinking plant sap.

Leaf 3. The beetle doesn't care about ant. Here and elsewhere on this plant, I saw no aggression between these species.

Leaf 4 and 5. The foreground: a mob of ants but no aggression between species. You also can see two beetles drinking from two holes in the background.

These leaves are too solid for ants to reach sap by their own. The fact that sap is important food for this ant species, you can discover in the next photo:

A crowd of ants on another plant's top. Probably, eating sap by their own... (Or something else?)

When I touched one of the ants with a stick, all the mob shuddered as one ready to fight as a crowd. 😀 So they tolerate the beetles not out of peacefulness.

I don't know if beetles get something from ants. Maybe ants guard bugs or... inspire them to write poems by tickling them? Idk.

Bad-Ass Termites

Another amazing representatives of the insects' county:

Touch them with a stick, they immediately bite it with their pincers. The smaller ones, probably a sort of workers, aren't less angry creatures. You really can feel how powerful they are when they (especially these bull-warriors), trying to kill your stick, pull it... Real murderers!

Wasps-Killers

Something even more vicious. When I saw this, I got a clue that this is a sort of wasp and its victim. Despite of this smart guess, I decided to do something silly - to touch the black ass with a stick. And it was a wasp, I was right! 😄 I was running away, barely holding back a scream of horror, not knowing if the wasp was going just to bite me or it also intended to lay a larva under my skin. 😨 I just didn't know! 😆

This is what wiki says about sand wasps:

[Their] nests are typically short, simple burrows, with a single enlarged chamber at the bottom which is stocked with freshly paralysed prey items for the developing wasp larva

So this fat creature (a larva of a beetle?) can be a victim, food for wasps' offspring...

On my way, I saw more wasps of this kind:

I wouldn't mess with them.

Twilight was Falling

It was time to come back along that gravel road. This time, I met no Lao family and saw no cars, only several motorbikes. People on bikes usually shouted out sabaidee! to me (meaning hello in Lao) and I answered with the same word. A meditative 45-minute walk, before pouncing on a plate of rice and chicken.

More stories from Southeast Asia are ahead! Check out the previous ones on my personal Pinmapple map.

I took all the images in the post with a Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G, Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D, and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 in May-June 2023 in Xepon (Sepon) District, Savannakhet Province, Laos.