Slow Boat

Some people said that we wouldn’t stick to our original plan – they were right. We had always planned on making a journey through Laos but not by way of a 2-day boat ride! Thailand is an awesome place for spontaneous last minute changes of plans because there are literally hundreds of travel agencies in every city competing with each other for our business so they are all very helpful and willing to answer any questions. I figured out our route from Chiang Mai and we set out the next morning. Our first stop was Chiang Rai about four hours north. Chiang Rai was an awesome, quieter version of Chiang Mai with cheap lodging, awesome bars, and a nice Night Bazaar! The next morning we set out for Chiang Khong, which is where we had to cross the Mekong River into Laos. The visa thing was all pretty easy leaving Thailand and we hopped on a taxi boat for Heuy Xai to get our Laos visa squared away and sign up for the slow boat in the morning.

After we got all settled into our place we set out for some dinner with some friends that we had met on the bus – we found out real quick that Heuy Xai sucked. The little village town was way overpriced and filthy! I was starting to wonder if maybe we had made the wrong decision committing to this much time in Laos…

The next morning we walked down to board the boat at the pier and we were really early so we got some nice comfortable seats towards the back of the boat. About THREE hours later we hadn’t left and there was about 150 people on this rickety old wooden boat… Thanks to Lonely Planet I knew that at a certain point you could actually demand that they charter two boats if the first one gets too packed and it was definitely too packed. At this point we had made some new friends at the back of boat and we all started scheming a way to stand up to the “Laos slow boat officials”! Our plan backfired much worse than we could have expected – before we knew it they had border control on the boat, English translators, and some pissed off dudes that we couldn’t understand. After some translation we figured out that they were trying to charge us more for the good seats now and that if we didn’t pay the extra 100 Baht the boat wouldn’t be leaving… It has now been almost four hours since the boat was supposed to leave and we were facing the chance of getting kicked off. This was hands-down one of the most nerve-racking experiences of the trip! Lindsay was ready to get off and buy a ticket for the next flight out of town… I didn’t want to stand down unless we were all ready to accept failure – we were asking them to charter another boat and they were telling us that we had to pay more for our seats – the negotiation was ugly! The only way we were making any headway was through a really nice Thai guy that new enough of both languages to help translate… I was starting to worry that things could seriously get ugly quick when they FINALLY gave up on the extra money thing and sent half of the backpackers to another boat! We won the battle and DAMN it felt good!

We spent the next six hours floating down Mekong River, which was an amazing experience. The scenery was beautiful and I just like being on the water so I was content for the whole ride just listening to some music, reading my book, chatting with other travelers and enjoying the riverside villages and locals along the way. Just after sunset the boat pulls into a hillside village known as Pak Beng. This place was primitive! Just as we unloaded the boat and started hiking up the hills to find our lodging for the evening they fired up the generators and the town lit up - one guesthouse at a time as we walked down the roads. This place was much nicer than our first town in Laos and actually had some good restaurants and lodging options – if they could keep the generators running!

Lindsay and I were running seriously low on cash at this point and just figured that they would have an ATM but when we pulled into this village we realized that wasn’t going to be the case so we had to get extremely efficient with our Kip and make sure that we had enough for lodging, dinner, breakfast and snacks for the boat the next day. Somehow we managed to get all of that for 150,000 kip or $17! When we loaded the boat the next morning it was packed with locals and all of their goods! The slow boat is their main form of transportation and they also use it for shipping goods to and from other parts of Laos so the second day wasn’t nearly as comfortable but the scenery was still amazing and I was on a boat so I was content.

By the time we finally pulled into Luang Prabang it was a huge feeling of relief, pleasure and achievement because we had just traveled through a large portion of the country via the Mekong, which is one of the most impressive rivers in the world! After having some sub-par experiences in the first two towns I really didn’t expect much from Luang Prabang but I was caught off guard when we walked up from the pier to find one of the coolest little cities I have ever been to in my life!

In the end, the slow boat was an awesome experience and I enjoyed every minute of it and I would recommend anybody traveling in that portion of SE Asia to take the adventure, but it’s probably not something I would do again…