Thursday, 7 July 2011

Rolling down a river – Wednesday 6th July

I think I spoke to soon about being fabulous with early mornings. This morning’s wake up call was hard – I didn’t sleep so well with my rock for a pillow and we had no sunlight streaming in our windows.

Breakfast at 6.45am – this was lovely, right next to the Mekong river as the sun rose. And then off to the Thai border. There were some issues with my passport, which was not fun, but it was sorted quickly enough (105 baht later). Then across the river into Laos!

The biggest immediate difference in country was that people drive on the opposite side of the road here! Funny that that changes just by crossing a river. I think the writing is different too – more squiggles. And of course the currency change – lots more zeros on the notes now!

What ensued next was a long couple of hours of Laos Visa applications/purchases and four different passport checkpoints. Then we finally got on our boat.

Everyone was very pleasantly surprised with the boat. The seats were comfy, there was a nice little wooden table with flowers to sit at and it was not all together a bad place to spend the next nine hours! 

There is not a huge lot to say about the boat ride – we basically just slowly cruised down a river all day. The day’s activities included reading my book, eating lunch at the table up the back of boat, sleeping for a few hours up the front on the deck chairs, with the river breeze and water lapping at the sides…and also just sitting and chatting with Kelly and the two boys with Bob Marley on in the background..

The mountains are beginning to appear...Another slow boat

The scenery slowly changed from flat and very green to hilly and very green. And it stayed very hot

In the end the boat ride only took us six hours – guess the water must have been flowing extra fast? Ironically nobody really wanted to get off the boat, even after the long time – we were all relaxing and the breeze was nice and cooling. But no, off into the hot sun again about 4pm in the afternoon.

We are in a little town called Pak Beng, right near the river – it is really small, with nothing but a couple of restaurants and a bar. It is just our stopover before we continue on tomorrow morning. Our hotel is really quaint and I am quite fond of it… except for the fact there is no air conditioning (they get power from generators here). 

We had three hours to kill before dinner – everyone basically had cold showers and sat under the fans, before heading into the town to grab a lemonade. Laos food for dinner – I had a Buffalo Lap, which tasted likes lots of coriander, lime juice and spring onions and not so much of Buffalo. Plenty more opportunity to eat Buffalo here though, its one of the signature Lao dishes.

IMG_0408 IMG_0405 Our cute (and hot) little room

After dinner we headed to the one bar in town for one drink – this bar was very empty and quiet, excepting two drunken Irish lads serenading each other with With or Without You. Then they started dancing like robots and broke a pot plant, while we all just sat and watched. I ordered a Beerlaos – it is not as strong as Chang and easier to drink. Still, I think one obligatory local beer is enough for this country!

Off to bed afterwards, a relatively early evening at 10pm.

(P.S. If you haven’t noticed yet, there are some links at the top right of this page that links to the rest of my travel photos)

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