Two Long Days on the Slow Boat

A typical backpacker entry into Laos from Northern Thailand is to cross the border at a place called Huay Xai, and take a boat down the Mekong River for 2 days into Luang Prabang. (An alternative is to take a faster speedboat that covers the distance in one day, but is smaller, louder and significantly more dangerous....we saw a few pass us and the passengers were wearing crash helmets!)

The slow boat was not particularly comfortable...or rather, it was uncomfortable: it was way overcrowded so there was not much room, there were just wooden benches (although you could buy a cushion) and the backrest for our bench broke within a few hours, there were a few drinks and crisps for sale on the boat at way overinflated prices. It looked like it was going to be a LONG two days, and it was! The boat made numerous stops along the way to pick up and drop off a few locals, and at one stage a woman got on carrying a bunch of live fish on a line. We later spotted these fish wriggling in a bucket in the non-too-hygienic toilet down the back!

We spent the night at a cute little town called Pak Beng half-way down the river whose sole function seems to be to serve the backpackers from the boat. It was just full of little stalls, restaurants and guesthouses. Interestingly it had no mains electricity supply and the town pretty much shut down at 11pm when the local generators went off.

However, being cramped in a confined space with so many backpackers proved to be a great way to meet people (Conor even met another actuary!) and we made a bunch of friends on that boat. The time passed over card games, games of chess, guitar playing, recounting travel stories, book reading, ipod listening and talking about people’s phobias (some of the more interesting ones included a fear of fish, and a fear of necks!) In the end, we actually had a great time on the boat, but were glad to step onto dry land when the boat finally pulled into Luang Prabang.