Perhaps it was the act of pushing upriver itself, tension in the boat from this unnatural effort, tension that transferred itself to us the passengers.

But the scenery left our eyes dull, unsated, our bodies were uncomfortable and restless, unable to doze the journey past. Ten hours on a throbbing boat yesterday, a little less scheduled for today, but I'm not optimistic. This is the "slow boat", myself and several other travellers are taking, each, I suspect, envisaging the romance of a journey along this ancient water road. But the boat is not slow enough to be tranquil, its engine not near quiet enough to allow conversation and its seats not forgiving enough to allow repose. There have been lovely moments: friendly chatter, sun streaming through green turned to gleaming white jungle leaves.

But all in all, more gruelling than charming.

Aside from the vague discomfort, on the way to our first night's stop in Pak Beng, I was hit by a really black moment. Mild hunger, mild headache and mild feelings of awkwardness towards just met fellow travellers aboard felt contributing. I just wondered what the hell I was doing, why I was putting myself through this, this travelling, these hours of nothingness inbetween even the mildly memorably experiences. Eating meals and sweating in heat, chopped conversations with fellow 1st worlders, lack of bonding with 3rd worlders of the countries I had come to visit. And the loneliness, the awful, continuing loneliness, mocking loneliness, always making my chosen existence seem ridiculous. Who would willingly chose to wander streets by themselves, eat dinner by themselves, hold and shape monologues with themselves? The countries ahead of me stretched meaninglessly forward - why did I need to visit any of them? All the sights I would see, was there any point to it all, was I just pouring money down my eyes?

These ruminations reminded me again of how I felt at the very beginning of my trip. I wondered in a silly mood, whether, now I had breaked in Kunming at the nine month, hypothetical middle point, was I about to experience the first half again? If so, and I'm not too adverse to that, as it will mean meeting Louise at the end once more, I am now about due to have a scary experience with a motel, and attend a wedding (as I wrote this, I realised I had just attended a wedding - very X-Files)...

This black moment of depression (or perhaps clarity) soon passed, and the boat continued on to Bak Peng.

Pak Beng

I was planning to break the trip up with a day in Pak Beng - but once I'd actually seen the town, I soon changed plans.

We travellers are like clumsy, o'er strong children, breaking the things we play with. Perhaps, some time ago, Pak Beng was a quiet river town on the Mekong, servicing traffic back and forth. Or perhaps it was always a bit dodgy, a comings and goings place. All I can say is that my one night there was remarkably wretched. A very small town with more guesthouses than I could count, everything that wasn't a guesthouse seemed to be a restaurant with English menus or a little shop selling supplies for tourist's travels onwards. Admittedly, I was like everyone else, I stayed the night and headed on the next morning. So maybe a longer stay would revealed something more pleasant, but I couldn't face the chance that my investigation would be unsuccessful.
The boat pulled up in evening darkness, an hour and half later than we had expected, leaving us irritated and hungry, to a rocky and steep shore / cliff. As we stepped across the narrow wobbling extended gangway, balancing with all our bags over the hungry looking water, we were beset. Young men and old boys surrounded us as we balanced on the splintered rock shore - touts selling guesthouses. I clambered up the rocks, issuing occasionally effective pronouncements like, "No", "Go away", "Leave me alone"! One passenger on the boat had been here before, and he strided at pace towards his old guesthouse - I followed him. I quite wished for some kind of cattle prod or taser, so I could disperse the couple of smug touts still following me, sure they would try to take credit for me achieving something that was well within my power to do on my own. Perhaps, I should have just relaxed and let them show me around - however, a group of travellers who did allow themselves to be escorted found their guides to have been somewhat, can I say, economical with the truth?
I didn't mind that Pak Beng was shoddy and basic; I hated the air of lazy trickery and misdemeanour that lay under the overpriced food and relentless offerings of "smoke, opium"?
I'd seen the young men of Pak Beng in different towns and cities around the world (and not just in tourist cities, to be fair). Uneducated, skilless beyond an ability to skim a bit off connecting someone with an easily found guesthouse, they swaggered as if they knew something everyone else didn't. Once checked in, I waited in the street outside for my friends - my guesthouse's tout was grinning at me: "You must go and check in, go and check in"! I had earlier told him to go away and leave me alone - this was clearly his attempt to reassert some feeling of superiority. With the anger I felt, given that we had been hounded since stepping into this town, and probably not with the calm contempt he deserved, I pointed inside, "No, I already have, go and talk to them"! But his English wasn't good enough to understand, it was pointless bothering to win arguments.
Perhaps the money that tourism offered was better than anything else going on in Pak Beng - it was certainly an easier life, to sit and wait for customers. While I couldn't begrudge these people that, now this little strip of houses on the Mekong seemed to have more guesthouses and restaurants and corner shops than Luang Prabang, and as there wasn't enough real business to fill all this capacity, the tourists were made to feel like piglets being rounded up for an abbatoir.

The electricity went off at ten past nine, and despite the chittering of rats in the wooden walls and the electricity (and thus the light bulb) switching on again at 2am, I slept deeply and happily, ready for my next day on the Mekong.

The next morning, most of us continued onwards. One member of our group was already taking a boat back to Luang Prabang, bizarrely. Over breakfast he told me he had come to pick something up and now he could return. "Opium"? I smiled, unable to think of anything else Pak Beng had to offer. He smiled, awkwardly, "Yes".

That day's journey was similarly over-long, we sat on the boat from 8am to 7pm. However, with a now realistic idea of how much food and water I needed, day two was much more pleasant. The expectation of promptness was gone too, which made me more content - I knew the boat would take ages and just settled down to read and wait as best I could. Post five pm, the setting sun and blue clouds were a calming lotion on my heart. I leaned my head out the side of the rushing boat and, wind in my unwashed hair, watched the long, long great river speed past us.
Once more in the darkness, we pulled up to Houaxyi, our river cruise over. Our feeling was more, it must be said, "We survived!" than "What a pleasant experience"! Knowing what I know now, I did the trip all wrong. Had I known how much the dark side of tourism development had claimed Pak Beng (and to a lesser extent, Houaxyi), I should have worked out how to go to less travelled destinations. I should have sat down with a travel agent in Luang Prabang and located on a map some small town where I might try and stay the night. All a learning experience....

Houaxyi

Waking in Houaxyi, with my friends from the Mekong gone onwards to Thailand, I walked a long street of guesthouses and travel agents. In the light of a drab heavy sky, the town looked off-white and tired. Everywhere in this morning, people waited. Waiting was what they did now, waiting for another wind to blow through the town, waiting for another foreigner to blow in to them, someone needing sleep or food or toilet roll. Although close to nothing was happening, this surely couldn't be that famous Laos tranquility the guidebooks talk about - this street put a tension in my shoulders just to walk down it. I ate a tasteless chicken curry for breakfast, the manageress making loud quips to ease over how pricy and miserable everything was. As I ate, two people arranged their onward passage across the border; as I paid, the old loud woman shrilled, "Leaving for Thailand today"? It was a town where everyone expected you to leave the next day - and so I was increasingly keen to.
I felt a little weary of Laos at that point. I felt like I was wandering from backpacker street to backpacker street and my sense of lacking any link to Laos, not having some list in my heart of the things I wanted to do, felt a lingering wound in my enjoyment of the country. I think, had I not told my monk friend Can that I would be returning to Luang Prabang, I would have crossed over to Thailand the next day. But, I had, and so didn't feel I could abandon him.

Acknowledging that my Laos loop was going to continue, I started walking, to see if I could get away from the multiplying guesthouses. I walked up a hill and very quickly the change was pronounced and exquisite. The guesthouses and travel agents fell away, a road of houses and then up to an army barracks. These people, the few that lounged within my eye shot, really were doing nothing, peaceful abstinence from activity. I walked on, and saw from this high vantage the river border with Thailand - a Buddhist spire and more modern buildings poked out from smooth green and red wooded hills.
No idea where I was going, I continued. These streets seemed to be a Houaxyi for whom tourists were merely a passing interest, some saw me and waved, others didn't. Old style wood houses on stilts crouched next to brick and corrugated roofed ones - though even in the wood slat houses, the gleam of television and electricity shone back at me like a watching eye. Outside a small hospital, a lake with lotus flowers floating, a wooden pier extending half way across it. I sat for a while, then went on. I felt a grip from inside my rib cage loosening. I saw, that morning, people dozing in front of their houses and shop stalls, little school children on their lunch break, teenagers nipping past on scooters, people just doing whatever they happened to be doing. Many of the large houses had a drinks stall in the front garden - perhaps for the mothers to make a bit of money while they spend the day looking after the children. I stopped in one and was handed something that tasted and looked like a cup of butterscotch liquid in ice - the children of the house wandered around casually, occasionally dropping down in front of a dubbed episode of Top Cat.

It was one of my favourite times yet in Laos. I returned to my guesthouse, which was now empty aside from me, with the intention of a quick nap before a late lunch. I plummeted to bed - the last two days of sitting on an uncofortable boat must have run me down more than I had realised - I slept for a few hours, my head chained to the pillow. Tomorrow, I leave the border area and head back into Laos, for some kind of eco tourism in the village of Viang Puhkar.

Daniel, 5 May 2004, Houaxyi