Mekong Inferno

My advice: do not take the slow boat.

Inferno implies that it was hot.   It wasn’t.   I didn’t want to say “hell,” because I consider myself the plucky type who always looks for the positive side when traveling.   But I would never take the slow boat again.   And if I wasn’t the type to view every experience here as a very privileged opportunity, no matter how difficult, I would have been absolutely miserable.   I have already taken it upon myself to seek out and warn other unsuspecting travelers who might be about to make the same mistake.

But, let’s begin at the beginning.   Leaving Chiang Mai.   The mini-van straight to the border was booked full, which was just as well since it was more expensive.   So, we turned up at the bus station directly after collecting our laundry in the morning where I had plenty of time to write the last (lengthy) blog, as the next border bus wasn’t for three hours.

People here are small.   I am a medium-small person in the U.S., but here I finally know how it feels to be  like Pat (six feet seven inches) every day.   The mirrors are too low.   I can never see above my neck.   When the toilets are western style, my knees are practically up to my chin.   I often have to duck and have smacked my head with the intensity of  someone expecting the way to be  clear several times.   It’s all in good fun, though.   I only point all of this out so I can tell about about the space on the bus.

When we chose our seats on the screen, I thought, “Wow… this must be  one big bus!”   Much like a prop plane, the screen displayed three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other.   When we boarded, I finally understood.   The bus wasn’t bigger.   The seats were smaller.   Much, much smaller.   I can’t be  more than 15 inches across at the hips, but that was wider than the seat!   So, we endured, snuggled in, and were fortunate to spead out as the bus emptied after the first couple of hours.

We landed in Chiang Kong, the border town, at around 8:30.   We found a map to a hostel  plastered on the wall outisde the 7-Eleven where the bus dumped us off and headed that way.   The owner was exceptionally sweet, got us set up with a room, cooked us dinner, booked our tickets for our trip into Laos, made a fantastic breakfast in the morning, AND let me borrow her bike so I could call my CASA kid before I headed into land of no phones.

The trip across the border was like being in a giant flock of sheep.   You can go it alone, OR you can pay one of the agencies to hold your hand as you go through each step of the process.   By booking our ticket at the hostel, we got the latter.   Thank goodness we don’t have enormous backpacks to deal with like everyone else!

After we had checked out of Thailand, ferried across the Mekong River to Laos, purchased our Lao visas, and checked in to Laos, we were driven  to a street of shops full of last minute  supplies.   There, we got the flavor of the trip to come.   My biggest disappointment with other tourists is when they have no curiosity for learning the local language and customs and also  have the gall to be  righteous about the smallest things that are even slightly different.   So, when the Lao man tried to communicate that they kept coming up one passport short and insisted that someone in the group hadn’t handed it over, people started getting angry.   Immediately they suspected that our passports (all 60 of them) were gone for good.   (SE Asia does not have a reputation  for a passport black market.   Reason: tourists are mostly white.   SE Asians are mostly not-“white”.)   Nicole and I raised our eyebrows as some the more fiery tourists pulled the classic talk-louder-in-English-because-they-must-be-deaf-if-they-can’t-understand-my-language.   Of course everything was fine and we boarded the boat an hour later without much fanfare.

Begin epic journey.   So, the seats:   hard benches, straight backed, ten inches wide, no leg room.   The passengers: 99% tourists.   40% rude and self-absorbed, of which, of course, 100% were loud an obnoxious.

Besides the incessant drinking (DRUNKing, beer spilling, etc.) and smoking, my biggest disappointment was apparently the hottest new technological advancement: a portable IPod stereo.

At least three groups on the boat had these, and we were unlucky enough to be  seated exactly in the middle of two of them.   One was a multinational group of partiers, and other other  was a group of Irish (Scottish?) 20-something that make all tourists look bad.   SE Asians are known for their modesty.   Often even knee length  shorts are risque.   So, these girls and boys must have looked like complete harlots to the locals working on the boat.   I was shocked  to see them straight out of COSMO/playboy magazine, right down to the make-up, jewelry, glamour-girl glasses, and teeny-tiny clothes.   Of course they had no awareness of their spilt beer running all over everyone’s things, their cigarette ash flying in the faces of those sitting behind them, or the fact that no one else wants to listen to techno music for eight hours at a stretch.   And that was day one. 🙂

We stopped halfway to our destination at Pak  Beng where a wonderful young woman named “Hom” (home) guided us to her family’s hostel with the most comfortable beds we’ve had in all of SE Asia!   Yay!   We went for a walk, which was glorious under the almost full  moon… until, Nicole practically crawled on top of me.   Turns out a lizard lurking in the street had bitten her!   How absurd!   We made our way back the the  restaurant we’d promised our patronage on the way out of town, examined the bite marks, invited Barbara (a Swiss woman) to eat with us, and sent Nicole back to the hotel to retrive some first aid supplies.

Dinner was great, and our host Sheuwan  (Shoe-wahn) was really helpful.   His candle-lit restaurant was gorgeous, and he even escorted us to the pharmacy and got them to decide that they were in fact “open.”   Then it was back home for some much needed  respite from they days hard benches.   Thank goodness this town runs on generators that are shut down at 10 p.m., or we would have spent the night listening to a very loud Lao TV!

Today was much the same as yesterday with less leg room but the added benefit of knowing who NOT to sit next to.   The scenery also becomes increasingly dramatic as the river approaches our destination – Luang  Prabang.   The last two hours of the ride were completely gorgeous.   And I got a ton of reading done, both from my guidebook and from the NY Times Bestseller I am reading “Three Cups of Tea.”   It is a really incredible book.   You are probably getting it from me for Christmas.   Just kidding.   Well, kind of.   But you really should read it!   It’s about an American man who sets about building schools to help the poor help themselves in Pakistan.   I have learned so much and been so moved, page after page, chapter after chapter.   I have to put it down just so I don’t use up the book too fast!

Our arrival in Luang  Prabang was a smooth landing, and our room is the nicest place we’ve stayed so far (for $3 each!).   The French influence is really obvious here.   I started salivating when we passed the first of many wine bars, but had a “Beer Lao” for Laos’ sake while we ate and chatted with some fantastic Australians.   Tomorrow it’s a 70k bike ride to some waterfalls.   I hope I have enough energy still to swim when I get there.   I’m sure tomorrow night I will completely collapse, but I am looking forward to the ride through “undulating rice paddies” to the tiered waterfall which is “very private except for a million butterflies.”   Can’t wait!