Boat Ride up the Mekong

Rather than braving more tortuous, windy bus rides through Laos, we decided to take a two day boat ride from Luang Prabang in Laos, to the Thai border at Chien Khong. The boat started at 8:30 in the morning both days and docked in small Laotian towns after 6, when it was too dark to keep going safely. There were basic guest houses and food options (and Beerlao!) in the towns where we spent our nights. The boats were long (maybe 60 feet?), narrow (maybe 10 feet?), wooden affairs. It is hard to describe them but they had a very Asian feel.

There were various, rather uncomfortable seating options on board, but by the beginning of the second day, we had re-arranged all the benches and were lying about on the floor, playing cards and sharing food with other travelers. We had a good crew of about 15 Western travelers on the boat, and about as many Lao folks. Our "clique" of travelers for those 2 days consisted of a South African couple who had been traveling for nearly a year, are about to return home and got engaged during the time that we knew them, a Canadian guy traveling alone, who plans on being away from home for a year, and is pretty much going to be traveling along our planned route through Asia and Australia/New Zealand, and a couple who had met traveling in Asia a couple of months ago: a girl from New Zealand and boy from Sweden. Our clique styaed up later than anyone else in those small Lao towns, talking about Asian and other travel experiences, telling each other about our "real" lives back home, and laughing a lot over Beerlaos. When we got to Thailand, we exchanged emails and went our separate ways, but I imagine we will see at least a few of them in different places, in the future.

The scenery along the Mekong was gorgeous. It is a very wide (maybe a mile at different places) and powerful river, with huge boulders and rock islands cropping out of it, as it is the dry season now. During the wet season, the river is even much wider and deeper. There are green, lush, hills and rocky mountains on either side of the river, that occasionally made us think of the Pacific Northwest and at other times of some tropical place in Central America. And for much of the hundreds of kilometers along one of the most important rivers in Asia that we traveled, we saw no one and nothing. No towns, no cities, no place to stop...No farms or factories or roads. Just hills and greenery. Here and there, we would see people walking along the river, with bundles on their heads or backs, or a small village of fisherman and farmers living in wood shacks. When there was a more substantial town, we would usually stop at it, and deliver people or bags of rice, sugar or other foodstuffs, and/or make collections of the same. Our mode of transport (river boat) was the only way to get people and goods to most of these places. On our last evening, as the sunset over the hills on the Thai side of the river, I was listening to our Ipod and thinking about all the people and places that the music I love makes me think of, and feeling so incredibly full of wonder at the world and love and gratitude for my life. A fleeting feeling, but a true one. : )