Boat, Boat, Bus

To head to Thailand, we decided to take the slow boat up the Mekong River from Luang Prabang. It is a two day journey, broken up by an over night stay in Pak Beng, and seemed like a nice way to relax and slow down a little. There were two options - local and cheap, or expensive and fancy - and we took the cheap, local option. This meant that the boat acted as transport for people from Luang Prabang to a variety of villages along the river, along with various supply deliveries. An 8.00am start (much earlier pickup from our accommodation) saw us on the boat with a mix of locals and tourists - most of whom were younger backpackers. It was slow, as advertised, and seats were a mix of hard wooden benches and recycled minivan seats. The scenery was pretty, including a shrine set in a cave overlooking the river, but after 10 hours on the boat we were pretty happy to see Pak Beng, even if it was pouring with rain. There is not much there, but we had booked a nice room close to the boat landing and managed to get there, and to our last dinner in Lao and back, without getting too wet. 

Day 2 was just wash, rinse and repeat. On the boat at 8.30am and then sit and watch the world go by. It was a different boat this time, although still with the converted car seats, but with sense of camaraderie with our young backpacking companions, who hailed from China, Japan, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and Australia (of course), and who we had interacted with only intermittently the day before. We were joined by a group of young Thai travellers, who had clearly been on some big adventure, and formed a third group on the boat, in addition to the locals. The Thais decided it was party time and at 10am bought all the beer on the boat and proceeded to claim an area in which they could have a big party. They were moderately obnoxious, but the advantage of starting at 10am meant that after a couple of drinks they all went pretty quiet for the middle part of the day, before firing up again for the last part of the journey. The other foreigners, and the Lao locals, exchanged sympathetic looks... 

Our border crossing point was the Lao-Thai Friendship Bridge No. 4, which we passed under on the boat a good 40 minutes before we stopped and were let off some way upstream. It joins the towns of Houayxay (Lao) and Chiang Khong (Thailand), and most of the backpacker-types were headed to Chiang Khong for the night. We shared a tuk-tuk back down the river with our new Chinese and Japanese friends, and had a race to the border with the other backpacking group, winning only narrowly thanks to a petrol stop along the way. 

It was at the border where our pretensions of being young and cool were rudely stripped away. Having done our research (strictly, Gillian having done our research), we knew that there would be a late fee for crossing after 4pm, and another charge for the shuttle bus to take us from the Lao to the Thai side. This was not the case for some of our travelling companions, who did not have any Lao cash left. Parent mode, activated! We started handing out cash to those who didn't have any so that we could all get across, and the process was then repeated on the other side where there was only one very expensive ATM available to obtain Thai baht to catch the one tuk-tuk into town. Gratitude was extreme (one poor 20 year old was in tears), with promises of beers if we crossed paths again. Any final thoughts we had of being fellow "backpackers" were punctured by the exclamations of how nice our hotel looked when we were the first ones dropped off. The $5 a night hostel was not going to be nearly as flash. The whole exercise cost about $10AUD and all our delusions about roughing it.

After a good nights sleep in a lovely hotel room (😀), we were on a bus to Chiang Mai the next morning. The only notable thing about the journey, really, was the very great contrast between the road quality in Thailand versus Lao, emphasising the economic disparity between the two countries. A six hour bus trip left us glad to be stopping in one place for a few days. No regrets for the slow boat, but it is not a journey we're likely to repeat.