The Slow Boat to Louang Prabang

The boat's almost full, at around 10.30 on Sunday morning, the scheduled departure time down the Mekong river on a 200km, two-day trip from Huay Xai, on the border with Thailand, to Louang Prabang - a lovely former french colonial town in the middle of northern Laos. Our craft is maybe 100 feet long, 12 feet wide, wooden, with two rows of two-person wooden benches, a thin walkway down the middle, an engine at the back that runs very loud and very hot and, mercifully, a wooden roof to block the bright sun. It's quite cool this far north but when the early afternoon sun gets on you, you warm up quick.

I realise I've left my only bottle of water at the guest-house breakfast table, a 10 minute tuk-tuk ride away. Since I'm going to be on the boat all day, I decide to risk going back up the sand-bank shore to buy another before we leave. I check with one of the drivers that it'll be ok, and he nods and half-laughs. I get the feeling that he knows something I don't.

Getting back on board, I'm behind a queue of what I take to be the last of the passengers, and am glad I already have a seat saved, as they take up the final spare seats. There's still no sign of movement from the crew.

There's no hurry. We wait for a while and another group of people turn up. Some plastic chair appear from nowhere, and get lined up single-file down the walkway for the late-comers, leaving no room to move. More people, more chairs, more waiting. The whole walkway crammed with chairs, a final dozen or so people arrive and have to content themselves with a square of floor at the very front, just behind where the two pilots share a central wooden wheel.

I'm beginning to be glad of the bag of clothes I separated from my main bag - stowed unobtainable in the aft - that I'm using as a cushion on the hard, thin bench. Having said that, I'm starting to wander whether the real cushion my bench-mate spent around a dollar on before we got aboard might have been a good investment.

In other places, the crowd might be getting restless by now, but this is Laos. Although most of us only entered the (still theoretically communist) republic last night from Thailand, as soon as you climb up onto this side of the river there's a tangible sense of calm and laissez-faire. The most impatience anyone shows are quips about how many times friends have recommended to take this boat, and how they might not be such good friends after all.

There are eventually signs of movement, and we push off to a jovial cheer from the tightly packed crowd, a mere hour or so late. Packed like sardines we might be, but still in a great mood.

5 hours later. The seats are hard, there's no space, and there's another two hours left to go, yet as I childishly hum Doors records and stare out across the slow, almost glass Mekong river at the scarred rock and sand banks, the water buffalo and the deep, rain forested valley we're cutting a route through, and I'm not sure I'm going to want to get off.

Except, of course, we're only halfway there, so perhaps I should stretch my legs this evening before we get back on board tomorrow morning, and do the whole thing all over again.


Will.
Having made it to Louang Prabang, The Laos People's Democratic Republic.


p.s. It turns out an hour late is pretty good. It was over 3 on the second day.