Laos: The Slow Boat
A sleepless overnight minibus ride later, we’re in Chiang Khong, on the Thai side of the Mekong River. The dinner or free breakfast doesn’t materialise, and neither do any of the other ‘included things’ we are promised. We cross the river into Laos by longboat at around 8am, and hang around for what seems like ever until we are finally taken to the pier. Not containing the promised facilites (as by now we’d expected) we cram onto the last few wooden benches near the front. There’s about 50 people on the semi-open narrow slow boat, and we leave around 11.30.
The scenery is pretty- mountains and jungle, but very samey after a while!
Luckily it’s breezy and fairly cool on the river, and the Beer Lao, and mountains of crisps and biscuits make the day pass quite pleasantly.
There are a few stops where young children come onboard selling fruit and drinks – like on Indian bus journeys. Numb-bum has set in, and in early evening we pull into Pak Beng.
With the air of a frontier Western town, or (once again) something off Deliverance, this place exisits only as an overnight stop. There’s a couple of streets rising up the hillside from the river, and a few guesthouses and bars (but the power goes off at 11pm). We find somewhere suitably disguting, dirty, but cheap (at least I didn’t have rats in my room, or get anything stolen by the owners like one unfortunate soul…) I tried to order buffalo curry for dinner, but they were fresh out. We sampled some of the local lao-lao rice whisky (in the style of moonshine). Bizarrely the first bottle had some sort of dead creature floating in the bottom, and the second had a piece of tree…. (incidentally the former tasted better).
Relatively unscathed we arrived at the quay the next as the boat was about to leave, and about an hour later it finally did. For some reason, the same people had been crammed onto a smaller and much more uncomfortable boat.
Some muppets decided it wasn’t safe, and got off thinking it might capsize: not sure they really thought how they were going to continue their journey. Not safe? Obviously never been on any of the wrecks I used to work at sea on… Today was just painful, and passed incredibly slowly, arriving at our destination of pretty Luang Prabang sometime in the afternoon.
Tags: Travel
Nick