Still in the provence of Champasak, we’ve traveled south-east to Ban Kiet Ngong and the Kingfisher Ecolodge, where we’ll been staying for the next few days. With fauna-rich wildlife on one side and village life on the other, it’s exactly the place to come to purge yourself of those last remnants of Western civilisation… and reduce your carbon footprint simultaneously.

A semi-rustic affair, this place is right smack on the edge of wetland territory and so quiet during the day you can almost hear a pin drop. Thanks in large to music and television being practically banned by the management, it’s easy to drift off into complete bliss and just swing in the (supplied with your chalet) hammock and listen to birds all day.

There’s a lot to like about this place, including the meticulous attention to detail when it comes to the energy consumption / facilities balance. Everything you need from a hotel room is in check here, except you are given a clearly defined (and well documented) limit on resources. Want a hot shower? go for it, but you only have enough hot water for four a day. Want to run the room lights? you can - but for only six hours day. When you run out, you run out until your batteries or hot water are replenished by the solar panels*.

We’ve had a couple of meals here so far, and the food is (for lack of a better word) amazing; a large menu full of Lao (and Italian!) dishes, freshly cooked (you can see them cooking it in the kitchen) and very fast service. I would’ve been satisfied if the food itself was ok, but the lunch and dinner we’ve had so far have been top notch. Not (in my experience) your standard eco-lodge fodder by a wide margin.

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* I’ve come back to this post a few days later to note that this hasn’t once has this been an inconvenience for us; we’ve always had enough juice to read by at night, charge our various gadgets and get clean in the morning. It makes me wonder why other more mainstream places aren’t like this.