The Slow Boat, Laos - 7th-8th December 2008

This is what the slow boats look like
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Rather than taking the 14 hour night bus to Thailand we decided to take the scenic route and catch the 2 day slow boat up the Mekong. We booked our tickets and paid a couple of quid more for “soft seats”. Not quite sure what to expect we got to the docks at 8am clutching our pack up of sandwiches and water and climbed aboard the boat via the narrow and rickety gangplank. The “soft seats” were, on one side, coach seats and on the other, car seats. They were bolted to bits of wood and plonked on the floor meaning that if you weren’t careful and moved too violently the seat would move back and squash the person behind you. The guy in front of us.....was not careful. The first day of the journey took 8 hours. I slept most of the morning! We stopped half way to offload lots of boxes on the front of the boats and swapped them for dozens of bags of oranges. The overnight stop was at a tiny place called Pakbeng. It’s a sleepy town made completely of wood. The electricity supply to the village is somewhat sporadic so all the hotels have generators that they switch off at 10pm so the whole village goes dark. We had a very good meal there. I had Lap which is minced meat and an herb (possibly sweet basil??) and spices with sticky rice. Mat had buffalo curry. He wanted grilled buffalo but was told it takes too long to cook.

Mat offloading the boat
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In the restaurant the owner was trying to plough everyone with free Lao Lao which is a stupidly strong rice based spirit. He even showed off to the next table by filling his mouth with it and becoming a human flame thrower by spiting it out over a candle. The following morning we rose nice and early and went in search of a shop to buy that days pack up. Given that it had been so easy to get good sandwiches throughout Laos we were disappointed with what we got in Pakbeng. The bread was stale, they gave me tomato ketchup when I asked for chilli sauce but on the plus side they did butter the bread which was a first. Mine were slightly better as they had salad, but they only had 1 slice of ham and were very poor specimens compared to the amazing Louang Prabang sarnies that I think will be hard to beat in the rest of the trip. Fully stocked with supplies we headed for our boat, cheerful in the fact that we thought we were going to have the same boat as yesterday...WE WERE WRONG!! The boat that we got shoved on had makeshift wooden benches where the backs ran at 90 degrees to the seat and the seat was so narrow you could only fit half your bum on. As usual with me in this situation, the boat owners had suddenly forgotten how to speak English when we told them we’d paid for soft seats. At least we weren’t the only ones to have been duped! Once we got going we pushed the benches to one side and sat on the floor, it was comfier! On the plus side we got talking to an American couple who we got on well with and decided to spend a few days travelling together. This time the cargo that we had on board was rice noodles and we didn’t even bother docking to offload them we just pulled up alongside two other boats and unloaded them through the window. After a couple of minutes a Thai guy walked down the edge of the boat and shouted at me and Topher, pointing at us, then the noodles, then his empty boat. We could only assume that he wanted us to help so we did, while he sat and had a cig!

At the Thai border
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We had to spend another night in Laos because the border had closed by the time we got there. We could see Thailand from our guesthouse, it was just on the other side of the Mekong.