The Mighty Mekong – slow boat to Luang Prabang

The Mekong river, the flowing heart of South-East Asia, the Mother river…

The facts:

A staggering 97% of the Lao population live in the Mekong river basin*. The livelihoods and food security of most of the rural population are inextricably linked to the river. The importance of the Mekong to a completely landlocked Laos is immeasurable.  But these facts, incredible as they are, are not the reason we wanted to visit the Mekong…

The fiction:

In my head, the mention of the Mekong river conjures up images of Apocalypse Now. Mystical, hedonistic, haunting. The powerful, flowing muddy waters surrounded by dense jungle vegetation, a place shrouded in ancient mystery with dark secrets, enough to drive man mad, a venture into the unknown. This was my idea of the Mekong, and although the reality these days is slightly different, when we finally got there, I wasn’t left disappointed.

From Huay Xai in Northern Laos we would take a two day slow boat down the Mekong river to Luang Prabang with an overnight stay in Pakbeng. I was SO excited. Although still early on in our trip, it was on my list of particularly special experiences in South East Asia.

Having made it safely across the Lao border, we spent the night in Huay Xai. Although there is little to the town itself, it does have a few places to eat and a few corner shops for picking up snacks for the boat. It turned out to be the ideal place to stay in preparation for a Mekong slow boat trip.

We booked the boat the day before departure and were picked up from our hotel by another ‘truck-tuk’. I would like to say our rucksacks were securely strapped to the roof before we set off, but they weren’t, they were loaded on the roof, then the driver kept one eye on the mirrors as we drove to the jetty, to make sure they didn’t roll off the top and out into the road!

And so we arrived at the jetty. The random guy we had arranged our pick up and boat ticket with disappeared off with our passports, simply telling us to ‘wait here’ – a somewhat uncomfortable moment, but this wouldn’t be the last time our passports were whisked off out of sight in the coming weeks and we rolled with it – our tickets were issued, our passports returned and we got on the boat to await departure…seriously, it couldn’t have been much more straightforward.

Now, you can take some awesome, expensive, private cruises down the Mekong, but that wasn’t for us. No, we opted for cheapest method possible and got the public boat. We’d heard/read some stories of having bad seats, being packed in, no food and drinks on board…thankfully none of this was true for us. Our seats, ingeniously, were recycled car seats and there was a little snack bar at the back of the boat serving all kinds of drinks and basic snacks. It was brilliant!

This little girl took a shine to Dougie’s flip flops!

Our boat was busy, but not overcrowded. There was a real mix of people, from western backpacking youngsters to Lao grannies and granddads heading home after some time ‘up river’ and everything in between (including our crazy family of four). The whole experience really gave us the opportunity to see both the awesome beauty of the Mekong and a side of Lao life that we would not have experienced on one of the private cruises or by any other means of travel.

As we settled in and sailed down river, people were being dropped off at random points along the its banks. Sometimes the boat would pull up to a bit of the shore where it looked like there was nothing but muddy shoreline and jungle, sometimes, but not always, accompanied by a rickety old wooden jetty. People would then emerge from the undergrowth, someone would get off the boat with supplies – we saw everything from from huge sacks of rice to petrol engines being offloaded. Then, as quickly as the people had emerged from the jungle, they would head back into it, where they were headed in that dense jungle was anybody’s guess.

Other stops were slightly more open, a semi-formal jetty jutting into the water, with a few traditional wooden pagodas on the hillside, indicating a village of some form. The fact that the surrounding jungle was so dense still makes me wonder how on earth these settlements had ever ended up there.

And then there was the scenery. There are no other words for it than simply spectacular. The vegetation was everything Francis Ford Coppler had promised me and more. Imposing steep sided mountains covered with jungle trees and plants, so huge that they would dwarf houses.

After a day on the river, wide-eyed with wonder, we arrived in Pakbeng to a throng of people on the jetty bustling for business. The daily boat arrivals carrying the prospect of potential overnight guests is an economic lifeline for this place that is literally in the middle of nowhere.

I shall describe the stop in Pakbeng as an interesting and extremely educational one. Laos’ poverty is on show in Pakbeng for all to see and the boat arrivees are a captive audience for the townspeople looking to earn an income. We had booked a ‘deluxe family room with fan’ at a Pakbeng homestay. Ok, for the price we paid, we weren’t expecting a whole lot of deluxe, but even for our low expectations it was a stretch – a bathroom in which you could hear next door’s conversations (thank goodness conversing was all they were doing!), plasterboard partitions, musty dampness – we had certainly paid less and stayed in much better in other places, but it didn’t look as though Pakbeng was too concerned with quality. Get them in, house them for a night, then tomorrow a whole new load arrive. I guess when you live in one of the poorest nations on the planet, the fact you even have a roof over your head is deemed deluxe and it certainly makes you think. And the view from just outside our room made up for what the room lacked, it was a full on Mekong experience.

View from our ‘guesthouse balcony’

With not a huge amount to do in the evening, we had a wander up and down the main road, ate our dinner in the homestay, and sat on our plastic chairs in the corridor come/balcony overlooking the Mekong with a beer. A good end to a day of spectacular scenery.

In the morning, we woke to warm mists over the river, the women of Pak Beng all in their best clothes lining the streets, with food, money and other offerings to be gifted to the local Buddhist monks – we had stumbled unwittingly into town on the day of the Alms ceremony. Watching with fascination from a distance, so as not to intrude on this traditional ritual, we discovered another unexpected aspect of Buddhist life.

And then the journey continued. The scenery was just as imposingly impressive as on day one – we really felt as though we were lost in the depths of Asia with sheer rock cliffs and mountains hugging the river banks either side of us. Then, slowly but surely as we progressed down the river, the terrain mellowed, the imposing mountain sides became more rolling hills until we reached our destination: Luang Prabang.

This really was a once in a lifetime experience (although I’d happily do it again!) that will stay with me forever. As far as I’m concerned, there is no other way to travel through Laos but by setting foot on the Mother river, lapping up the scenery and settling in for the ride.

 

*Source: http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/basins/mekong/mekong-CP_eng.pdf