The alarm went off
at 5.30am and we were out of the room by 6.30am. As we reached the
main road, a passing tuk-tuk driver saw us and pulled over and we
started negotiating a price out to the slow-boat pier. Luckily, Kate
had remember the name of place where the boats leave from, as the
driver was stumped when we talked about slow boats (even when we made
floating boat signs with our hands). The boat office was shut when we
arrived, so we dumped our bags and settled in to wait. There were a
few other Westerners waiting, but I was at the front of the line when
the office opened and I soon had four tickets to Pak Beng, the
halfway point, for 110,000 kip each. We then grabbed our bags and
climbed aboard our boat, a long, thin covered wooden vessel with two
rows of two-person seats running along it. We had heard that the ride
could be long and painful due to the hard, wooden seats, so were
surprised and relieved to see that we would be sitting on some nice
new padded seats – which turned out to be car seats.
There were only
three other white folks on board with us as we waited, but a constant
stream of locals climbed aboard with great big bundles of this and
that. A horde of young Westerners then turned up, but they climbed
through our boat and onto another moored beside us and then set off
up the river. Just as we were almost ready to go, a whole bunch more
white people arrived and clambered aboard – these were obviously
the people who had paid full price for their tickets (suckers!). By
then the boat was completely full and off we went. The girls' flu had
well and truly settled in, and they both spent a lot of the journey
sleeping – Zoe on my lap and Sarah on Kate's.
After we had been
going for a while, I saw a German guy go up to the front to take
pictures from the boat's open doorway. I joined him and then took his
spot, until the captain waved me up to the front of the boat. I'm not
entirely sure why, but I think he may have been concerned that we
were going through a hairy bit of the river. I get the impression
that the Mekong is pretty shallow, and it was certainly a real
maelstrom – great gushes of water kept rising to the surface and we
passed by some very impressive whirlpools and through some very
turbulent sections that could almost be described as rapids. More
worryingly, we also passed by some emergent rocks, which just made me
think of the submerged ones we were also passing. Certainly the
captain was a model of intense concentration, zig-zagging the boat
from bank to bank following an internal map that's surely been burnt
into his brain over decades of making this same trip.
We had the chicken I
bought in the market last night for lunch and then settled back and
watched the forest pass by. Or the lack of forest. The further
upriver we went, the greater the deforestation we saw – hillsides
covered in grass and blackened stumps, often with small wood and
thatch covered platforms, the function of which we never determined.
As we pootled slowly up the river, stopping here and there to drop
off locals and their possessions, we were occasionally overtaken by
the 'fast boats' – small speedboats that seat about ten people and
make our overnight journey in a single day. Suffice to say we felt no
jealousy – the boats looked cramped and bumpy and, crucially,
unsafe. They apparently travel at speeds of around 70-80km/h and
having seen how treacherous the river can be, the potential for an
horrendous accident looks all too real. We actually met an Italian
family who had taken one of these boats and they said that while the
kids loved the thrill of travelling so rapidly, the parents spent the
whole time in mortal fear. Amusingly, in most of the boats we saw,
the only person wearing a helmet was the driver.
We eventually
arrived in Pak Beng at around 6pm. While the girls and I got the bags
off the boat, Kate walked up the village's only road to look for
somewhere to stay. She eventually chose the guesthouse nearest to the
pier, where we got two pretty basic rooms with fans, beds, bathroom
and little else. We then walked up the road and had a pretty good
Indian meal for dinner, our table offering a marvellous view down
onto the Mekong. As we ate our meal and the sun went down, we saw
numerous large bats come out and begin hawking over the river.
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