Getting to Laos: How to Avoid the Engine Room

Hi, faithful readers. Because we have to leave Thailand periodically according to our visas, the plan all along has been to travel as tourists in neighboring SE Asian countries between our different WWOOF Thailand locations. In the chronology of the blog, therefore, here begins our three-week trip to Laos. (Although really these events occurred at the beginning of February.)

To get there, we took a two-day ride on a “slow boat” eastward along the lush Mekong River—from the Lao-Thai border to the central town of Luang Prabang. Step had read about the slow boat ride in blogs online, and Pilncertainly had no objection. It’s not necessary, of course, and it’s a little more expensive than taking ground transport, which also stretches to two days. Ours was not a luxury cruise, though if you have hundreds of dollars to spare, you can read about that option in the Wall Street Journal.

The slow boat is, of course, cheaper, non-life-threatening, and substantially less destructive to the ecosystem than the whining, thrashing speedboat in which you can tear through the otherwise tranquil Mekong. Please don’t take the speedboat. You might die.

Clmbing down after throwing up some unusually shaped luggages.

Day 1

From Chiang Mai, we hopped a bus northeastward to the Thai border town of Chiang Kong, across the river from the Lao town of Huay Xai (also spelled Houie Sai or Hoksay), and stayed in a guesthouse on the Thai side. The next morning, we still had to travel to the border, exit Thailand, travel through no-man’s-land, enter Laos, and travel to the boat launch. Unfortunately, we accepted our guesthouse’s offer to arrange morning transportation to the border for us, which—surprise!—left much later than they’d said. Instead of being an hour early, we didn’t get to the boat launch until maybe ten minutes before the scheduled departure. Note to self: arrange own transportation. But also, you just can’t sweat the small mishaps, because you can end up with the best seat in the house: sitting at the back of the boat on a plastic chair next to the good luck bird cage, a beautiful French lady, and someone's pig (in a rice sack).

Our boat's good luck charm.

The boats are long, roofed, and relatively narrow, with a central walking aisle flanked on either side by rows of forward-facing seats in pairs, recycled from old buses. The young guys manning the boat tossed luggage down into two cargo holds belowdecks, each accessed through a removable plank. Because we were among the last people to arrive, the only seats available were cross-facing seats in the far aft engine room, which was also where the crew stored their belongings, food, pots and pans, etc. This room is so named because it is adjacent to—and only partly walled off from—the boat’s engine. In fact, to enter or exit this space, you must take a few steps on a narrow walkway past an opening where the actual pistons and gears are roaring away. Even farther aft, at the very end of the boat, is a small observation deck where Step managed to score a seat next to a French couple for the duration of that first day—beautiful, serene, and with a chance to practice her French, albeit with a steady stream of passengers coming out to smoke endless cigarettes. Pil honestly didn’t much mind sitting in the roaring engine room, watching the incredible scenery go by and occasionally shouting short sentences in Spanish. About 90% of the people on the boat were foreign tourists.

To either side, tall green hills. Beyond them, mist. Occasionally we saw cliffs of which parts had fallen off, and a variety of boats. Boat travel on the Mekong seems to be alive and well, as we saw many fishing boats, ferries, and cargo/house boat combinations that devoted the majority of its space to shipping, with a brightly-colored house comprising the entirety of the stern.

The slow boat always stops for the night in the town of Pak Beng. A small river town far from any metropolitan area, tourism appears to be a major prospective source of income. No doubt they’ve got other things going on, too, but we only spent a few hours there, and didn't get a chance to look deeper. When the boat pulls up, there are representatives from a handful of guesthouses waiting with smiles, some English, and laminated advertising materials for their accommodations. Partly from our common sense about people trying to sell us stuff, partly from having read some travel blogs about the boat ride, we skipped their offers and found ourselves a decent and not too pricy room easily enough, which along with every other guesthouse touted its free wi-fi (why this seems to be the selling point above, say, soft mattresses is unclear to me). The main street, for a short stretch up from the boat landing, is lined with cafes and bars advertising much Western food in English. We walked farther, however: our first night in Laos! Gutter ditches lined the dirt road. (In larger towns these are concreted, but not in more rural places like Pak Beng.) We saw a lot of what appears to be the classic Lao/Thai village storefront: a three-walled room with the empty fourth wall facing the street, with the family’s living room and, say, television, visible behind the business space.

Places to go, people to see! Really though I think she biked to the top of this hill just to bike down.

We still can't get over the Mekong.

For dinner, we managed to locate a restaurant with no menu in English, where several tables had only Lao people eating. We asked our proprietor what the tables to our left and right were eating, respectively, and got the same answer, which we didn't understand, but took to be a good sign. We think it was barbecued goat, and it was delicious. We also received our first lesson in Lao hospitality, which always involves either offering to share your beer, or a shot of whichever locally-distilled hard alcohol is in your recycled bottle. In this case, we got shots of an herbal rice whiskey from our left-hand neighbor, a garrulous older man keen to chat. We had the first of many conversations about our Thai, which we consider very basic but impresses people with whom we come into casual conversation, and about Lao. In case you were wondering, which we were not by the time the 12th person had this conversation with us: according to Lao people, Lao people can universally understand Thai, but Thais can't always understand Lao, and the differences they always point out are hello, thank you, and twenty.

Day 2

The next morning, having learned our boat lesson (maybe Pil had minded the engine room a little), we were among the first people to board. After we successfully located the two boats that were going in our direction and not back to Thailand, we claimed seats near the front, stashed our luggage, and tried to keep out of the way.

The scenery on the second day was at least as gorgeous than the day before. One interesting feature was the many riverbank gardens that appeared to have been planted in the sand, with crops arranged in unmistakable rows and demarcated with rough bamboo fences. Another great feature of that second day was the boat’s willingness to pick up passengers along the way. The boat made maybe five or six such stops: once pulling into an unmarked patch of shore where a woman and a boy stood waiting with shoulder bags, once dropping a young man off at what appeared to be just a slope of rocks.

An anecdote:

On the tuk-tuk ride from the Lao border to the boat launch, we had met a young guy from San Francisco who currently lives and works in South Korea. He carried a comically large camera and said this was his first trip to Laos. (He also mentioned, to our skepticism, that he was planning to try to visit North Korea the following month.) After that brief exhaust-scented conversation, we didn’t see much of him until the second day.

At one of the unmarked mid-river stops, the disembarking passenger turned out not to be Lao, but rather a different American man in his forties or fifties. We heard him say in passing that he’d been coming to Laos for fourteen years, and that he had friends in this tiny riverside village. And who should this veteran traveler have in tow? The Gentleman from San Francisco, of course, camera and all. The two of them hopped off the boat onto a loose collection of half-submerged logs. It certainly appeared as though they met for the first time aboard the boat, and the one had somehow persuaded the other to bring him along.

Late in the second day, about an hour before the end, we passed a famous cave in a cliff face that houses a famous Buddha shrine, with steps leading directly down to the water. Alas, we never managed to visit it. Amidst all the incredible views, however, Step did manage to read the entirety of White Teeth (by Zadie Smith, highly recommended) during the two-day trip, aided largely by the fact that she failed to charge her camera during our stay in Pak Beng and thus couldn't document the even more spectacular scenery of the second day. Finally, late in the afternoon, both boats came ashore at a large sign that read, LUANG PRABANG PROVINCE. We went up the stairs and rode an overfilled, wheezing tuk-tuk the ten kilometers into town. Our Lao adventure thus began.