Slow Boat to Laos

Please note: I have some truly amazing pictures from the boat ride but have to work on fixing up some corrupted files before I can post them. Check back soon for pictures!


The following morning I caught a tuk tuk to a local bus to the border town of Chiang Khong. Thanks to the help of a few friendly employees at a travel agency there, I barely managed to pass immigration into Laos in time to catch the only slow boat leaving that day.
I had heard incredible stories about the beautiful two day boat ride along the Mekong, and thus had been looking forward to this leg of the trip. The stories, however, had not prepared me for the crowds of people filling the boat beyond maximum capacity. As I stepped on board, I maneuvered around the people and luggage strewn about everywhere. Just as I began to lose hope in finding a spot a man stood up and offered me his seat, saying he was going to find a roomier place on the aft deck.
I settled onto the uncomfortable wooden bench, built for a person of impossible proportions. The seat was high enough off the deck that my legs dangled in mid-air. Yet the seat was narrow -- only about 6" deep and the hard tall wooden back pointed straight up at a right angle to the seat. The only bathroom on board was a litle room towards the bow with a hole cut into the deck. As two more people crowded next to me I realized that two 9-hour days spent this way would pass very slowly.
For all the disadvantages of traveling in such an uncomfortable way, the experience fosters a sense of comeraderie between passengers. I soon found that it didn't matter if my bare foot extended onto the seat, perhaps lower back of the person in front of me, as we were happily exchanging stories about our travels anyway. I shared my crackers, and they their fruit, and I began to enjoy the beautiful scenery as we puttered down the Mekong. We passed tiny villages -- so remote from the modern world. Women waved as they washed children and laundry in the river.
We stopped a few times to pick up more passengers from sandy riverside beaches. At one stop people lugged bags of rice onboard. With nowhere else to stow them, the rice bags quickly became seating in the center aisle, piled 3 feet high in some places. Tourists, Thais, and Laotians alike teetered precariously on the hard lumpy bags.



At each stop local children scurried on board to sell drinks and snacks to the boat passengers. There was never enough time for us to get off the boat. Once, while sitting on the side rail to give my sore bum a rest from the wooden bench, I turned to find myself face to face with a stack of a dozen large rats splayed out and skewered on a stick. Their beady eyes bulged and naked tails dangled, fur still clinging to tehir gnarly claws. All I could do was turn around to see the bored expressions of my Laotian companions in stark contrast to the startled looks of my fellow tourists. The little salesgirl persisted, bobbing the rats up and down above my shoulder like some kind of gruesome death puppet.



By sunset we had arrived in Pak Beng, a tiny village half way to Luang Phaban. I checked into a simple guest house and accompanied some fellow boatmates to a riverside restaurant for sticky rice, sweat and sour chicken, and a cold beer Laos. Laos only opened to tourism in the last 2o years and is still on the UN list of least developed countries. While scarred by decades of war and oppressive communist rule the people, though very poor, are friendly, welcoming, and beautiful as the pristine landscape. The majority of the country still survives on a subsistence lifestyle -- some communities have remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years.



That said, Pak Beng, like most villages in Laos, has electricity for only a few hours each evening (supplied by gasoline-powered generators). There was something so peaceful about seeing the reflection of the moon on the Mekong River beyond the unpaved road with its sleepy shopfronts illuminated by flickering oil lanterns. The second day on the slow boat was longer, but the scenery even more stunning. I whiled away the hours reading or making small talk with new friends. For a while I sat next to a large German man -- a computer programmer named Dennis. His long legs were obviously cramped and only half way through the trip he was already tired of the boat. Still he remained positive, smiling broadly -- even through his heavily accented complaints:
"This boat is ex-treeemely uncomfortable. I am hating this now."

People dealt with the discomfort differently. Most tried to find a distraction to keep their minds off the hard seats and cramped legs. At one point a Japanese hippie named Koji with enormous dreadlocks entertained me with his amusing antics and travel stories. He challenged me to a thumb war to while away some time. Eventually his goateed Italian sidekick dug up a guitar from somewhere. The entire boat was then serenaded (like it or not) by any and everyone who had ever attempted to play guitar.

Finally we arrived at the beautiful sandy Luang Phaban port. I felt like kissing the ground but instead took up my pack and trudged up the hill with group of newfound friends.