Taking the slow boat to laos...the really slow boat

Once you've made it all the way around the globe, up through Thailand's mountains, spent hours in public buses sharing your seat with a Thai baby and chickens, and have shouldered a fourty pound pack all the way to the small town of Chaing Khong...there's one last step in the journey to Laos: a slow boat down the Mekong River.

Sounds romantic and picturesque, right? Hmm, though the sight of the Mekong running through the valleys in Laos is certainly breathtaking, the sounds, smells, size, and speed of the boat also takes your breath away (but more like the sensation of suffocation rather than delight). To maximize profits, boat operators here pack as many foreigners as there are "seats" onto a small wooden longboat with a heavy, noisy diesel engine that putts at a painfully slow pace down the river. I can't give an actual speed for the boat, but let's just say that turtles waved as they passed. Originally cargo ships, these boats now have wooden planks no wider than eigth inches (obviously no one bothered to measure the average foreigner's rump size) and extremely upright wooden backs. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that no floor room existed either, forcing me to hug my knees for eight hour stretches.

Then, after all the foreigners were packed on, the locals made their appearance and climbed aboard all available floor space in front, in back, and on top of the boat. With them they brought bags of dirt, rice, cages of ducks, babies, baskets of corn, and all of their fish net knitting supplies to occupy their time on the trip. We stopped at sand bars and dirty river banks to unload, reload, and pick up an extra kid. Sometimes we would stop without explanation, only to have a woman run down out of the hillside thirty minutes later to deliver lunch to a single passenger.

All of this...for a total of fifteen hours over two days...

The Mekong slow boat is terrible and wonderful all at the same time. But if you make it to SE Asia, it's one of the things that you just have to do...and never do again.