Indelible Roots

So we arrive in Pak Beng, half way to Luang Prabang around five or six in the evening. As soon as the boat docked kids jumped on board and wrestled each other for our backpacks. I had read about this scam where they take the pack to the guest house for you and charge you four dollars and took my pack off the youngster as he started to leave the boat.

Kylie and I then headed up the hill to a guest house mentioned in my soon to be apparently out of date Lonely Planet book. We found Bounmy guest house where it should be on the map and got into separate rooms. I felt it was overpriced at three hundred baht and almost went off looking for another place. My fan didn’t work and I had to ask the staff a dozen times to get it looked at, then to get it replaced. They told me they would give me another one when I went to bed.

I then had dinner there with a couple of guys from the boat. Roger is an Aussie on holiday and John is a Brit taking a year off of school. Rog shows me the bottle of scotch that he’s been polishing off during the boat ride and it’s nearly empty. I order some food and have to ask the staff twice for my drink.

The staff member and likely a family member is named Money or something like that. He drinks a bit with us and Rog asks for a bong to smoke the pot he got when he arrived here. Money then says he has  “a friend” who will make him one for three hundred baht.  Rog agrees and starts goofing off with his Thai cell phone. Money then takes the cell phone and disappears for an hour. When he shows back up there are messages on it and we scroll through them to find that money has been taken off the phone and transfered to another phone. But Rog is too drunk to remember how much money he had left on the phone.

We then agree that this place is a scam and ask for our check several times. Rog also says he doesn’t want the bong anymore and Money immediately goes out and brings back this stick of bamboo and starts whittling away at it. We finally get our bill and it has food that we didn’t order on it. Finally we get it squared away and Rog treats us to dinner. I leave and as I was leaving another staff member gruffly asks if I had paid.

I then remind him that I want my damn fan. It was a cool night, but if I’m paying three hundred baht for a room with a fan, I’m getting a fan. Turns out that the fan didn’t work in the room because the eighteen gauge wiring doesn’t deliver enough electricity to run it. I then find that the hot water is disconnnected even though it’s supposed to have hot water. There is also no towel, soap, or paper towels and I have to dry myself off with my pack towel after the shower. The bed is caved in in the middle and looks so dirty I take out my sleeping bag liner Ali gave me and sleep on that.  I found out in the morning that Kylie’s room wasn’t much better though it had a working fan and she slept in her clothes.

At 6:30 I get up to the sound of roosters and find that there is no electricity as no one has started the generator. I take my cold shower using the fan to prop open the bathroom door and go downstairs with my things. One of the staff members asks if I want breakfast to which I said I was going down to the boat and threw the keys onto the desk and left.

At the dock I find that we have been moved to another boat, a smaller boat. I say this and one of the Laos passengers relay my message to the boat man. He says it’s not smaller the lying bastard. It was a good three feet narrower and I’m only slightly happy to get there early to tie my bag to one of the seats. I then go off to walk the town, find breakfast, and get some snacks for the ride.

At 7am on the 15th I left Bamboo to find an ATM machine. Apparently there are no banks or ATMs in Huay Xai, Laos. Being only half awake as usual in the mornings, I only got five thousand baht out, about one hundred sixty dollars as I don’t like carrying around a lot of cash. The immigration office opened at 8am and stamped us out of Thailand. Then it was a thirty baht boat ride packing about ten people in tandem to get over to Huay Xai. In Huay Xai it was another twenty baht “off duty hours fee” to get stamped into Laos.

Then I was off to find the Gibbon Experience of which I had heard so much and received zero information from the company after two emails separated by weeks. It then occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t bring enough money to cover the expenses. I did find the company shortly there after and was told that there was an opening that day. However it costs one hundred ninety-nine US dollars to which I said I didn’t bring enough, scolded the gal for not returning my emails asking for price and other information (she merely said that they were full, that is they don’t reply if they don’t have openings,) and I left. I remember on their sparse website that there are no banks/ATMs there.

So it was off to BAP guest house to book a slow boat to Luang Prabang. I met Kylie from Oregon here who pointed me to the lady booking the boats. It was only after I had booked the boat trip that she had gone on the Gibbon Experience the past three days, how great it was, and that she booked it with her credit card. Huh! Well, I had just paid nearly thirty dollars for this boat trip, so the Gibbon Experience will have to wait another decade.

OK. So Laos is the poorest nation in South East Asia. So thirty dollars should be a huge amount of money, thus we should be getting a nice, luxurious ride to Luang Prabang. NOT! We were told to be ready at 9am and the tuk tuk arrived at 10am. Then we waited around on the boat that was supposed to have “nice seats” according to BAP guest house staff, it had wooden seats that hurt your hiney just looking at them. We waited and waited and another eighty tourist shows up at about 10:45. Packed in like sardines with people on the floor between the seats, standing by the engine room, and draped over some cargo we finally left Huay Xai at 11:15.

I found out later that you can charter this same boat for a little over one hundred US dollars. I’m sure the boat owners are making a thousand dollars on this trip, so who is making the two thousand nine hundred dollars in profit? This is definitely a scam and left me with a bad taste in my mouth for Laos.