Down the Mekong

The journey between Chiang Mai and Chiang Khong, a little town on the border between Thailand and Laos, took seven hours. The route was pretty mountainous, which normally means it may as well be a journey into hell if you suffer from motion sickness. However, whatever sadistic part of my body (inner ear? brain?) has objected to travel in any sort of moving vehicle for my entire life, seems to have formed some sort of reluctant amnesty with my stomach, as I've not been feeling travel sick at all since we got here.

It was dark by the time we reached Chiang Khong, so we banded together with some other backpackers and jumped in a truck to go to a nearby guesthouse. The accommodation was pretty basic, but it did have views of Laos across the Mekong river. A sense of camaraderie started to develop between all the backpackers at the hostel, as most of us were planning to travel into Laos and then down river to Luang Prabang. We got to know in particular an American guy with multiple personalities, (he told us he was from Colorado then told someone else Memphis...) a voluble Canadian, a painfully cool-looking Norwegian couple and two smiley English girls.

We all got the ferry across the river together on Wednesday morning, and acquired our Laos tourist visas. The process couldn't have been easier or more casual although the price was slightly painful. All of us then got tickets for the slow boat down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang, which took two days of travelling for about eight hours, interrupted by an overnight stay in a tiny village called Pak Beng.

The journey was very slow at times, but the scenery was incredible. Laos is very undeveloped and at times we cruised for miles without seeing any signs of habitation on the banks. The river was brown and completely opaque, and the current was so slow that in places it didn't seem to be moving at all. The banks were white sand, rising into lush jungle and tall cliffs. It was possible to sit on the side of the boat with your legs dangling over the side, so I stayed like that for most of the second day.

Being an English Lit geek I spent most of that time thinking about Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick, both of which have long chapters describing sitting on a boat studying the water pensively and thinking about the universe...And that hopefully is the closest I'll ever come to any other experiences from those books. No shipwrecks or jungle ambushes here please.

We spent quite a lot of time speaking to a Swedish guy on the boat, and also got to know a Canadian couple in Pak Beng, so things are definitely getting more sociable, probably because we're on a fairly well-established tourist trail. We arrived in Luang Prabang around sunset - updates to come, including news of the most spectacular quiche...