Relaxed and Refreshed by the Mighty Mekong - and a Little Beerlao!

We've just arrived in Luang Prabang, Laos, after two wonderful days travelling down the Mekong river by slow-boat. What a relaxing way to travel! We'd journeyed by air-conditioned mini-bus about 250 km north from Chiang Mai to the border town of Chiang Khong. We stopped three times during the day for refreshments, and to visit the site of a modern Buddhist wat - this one completely white (as compared with the gold-encrusted, multi-coloured wats we'd seen elswhere) and covered in little mirror-tiled filligree decorations, so that the whole thing looked like a Disney-inspired scene covered in sparkling, frosted snow. On the way, we reckoned that about 99.9 percent of all the vehicles in Thailand are pick-up trucks - a higher prcentage even than Texas - mainly Japanese or Korean marques. Unlike Texas, thankfully, we saw none with rifle-mounted tripods on the flat-beds - always a disquieting feeling, driving behind one or those, constantly looking down the barrel of a gun on the great Texas highways a few years ago. For most of this journey, we travelled on a good road (currently being extended right up through Yunnan province in China, to connect Bangkok with this great trading partner to its north) through lush, dripping-green jungle-like landscape, and one. more gently-rolling, but still lush-green, national park.
Chiang Khong was a slightly ramshackle, 'spaghetti-western' looking wood-built town with dirt roads and supply stores - though not a cowboy in sight.  (Can you have an eastern Western?!)  At these supply stores, you can buy 5 kilos of rubber ferrules, 60 metres of barbed wire, several tonnes of angle-iron, and a bar of soap!   After clearing customs (a small window in one of the many wood-boarded shacks), we each threw our luggage into a long, but very basic wooden row-boat for the 5 minute crossing into Laos, at Huay Xai - a slightly less ramshackle, but still mainly wood-built, dirt-roads, little town. As we landed, we were greeted by dozens of small boys, each between about 6 and 14 years old, who vied with each other to unload our bags and carry them up the steep little roadway from the landing stage and into our accommodation just a few minutes walk from the river. Felt like we'd stepped into a scene from 'Death on the Nile  For this mighty effort, they each earned 10,000 Kip from us (about 85 pence), though we were assured by our Intrepid Travel guide (a company which seems to have a very good set of ethics), that this was far from child labour exploitation, but rather a good way for these youngsters to contribute to the family income.   . After being warmly welcomed by our diminutive, 72-year-old, multi-lingual, joke-telling, giggling host, Sing, at the Aramid guest-house, we were taken to our various 'rooms' for the night. These turned out to be charming little individual bungalows, each with its own verandah, a comfortable bedroom, and a truly quirky little shower-room - which, nevertheless, worked extremely well. Mr Sing stood beaming at us all again as we assembled to walk into the town for a lovely Laos barbecue meal. He seemed to be completely taken with me, perhaps because I'm the oldest female in the group by far, and flirted amusingly and boyishly with me, repeatedly pronouncing my name out loud (Bar Bar Ah) as though it were some poetic, or even religious, chant. By the time we left in the morning, he was proudly telling the whole group that very soon I would be the new 'boss' at his guesthouse, and we stood together behind the reception desk while Andy took a photo to record this undiscussed 'pact'. Our Laos barbecue that evening was delicious - cooked by ourselves on the table-top in little pots, each shared between 4 people. Jenny and Clive will be familiar with these little pots, which have a kind of 'gutter' around the edge in which some delicious vegetable stock had been poured. In the middle of the pot was a covered dome, under which were red-hot charcoals. On the top of the dome, we cooked our raw fish and meat, while the vegetables cooked in the stock in the gutter at the edge. A cross between a barbecue and a fondue, really.

The next morning, a beaming Mr Sing saw us off, complete with packed lunch prepared by Mrs Sing (the current 'boss', he tells us), as we walked back to the river to catch our 35 metre long, comfortable, riverboat for the trip to Luang Prabang.   The Mekong is the 7th longest river in Asia, starting in Tibet and coming down through China, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia into the South China Sea.   It is also the 12th longest river in the world.   (Cameron, Dylan, Lucca and Rui - here's a challenge for you:  which rivers are the 1st to the 11th longest in the world? We certainly don't know!),

The Mekong is a wide, deep-brown river (mainly because of the 'churn' of the sandy soil under the often fast-flowing and seemingly multi-directional currents - we saw many swirling whirpools and eddies, and there were parts of the river where some of it seemed to flow in one direction, whilst other parts flowed in other directions at the same time!.   The pace was slow and relaxed, and we watched fishermen at the banks throwing upside-down-umbrella-shaped nets into the shallow waters by the banks, peasants panning for gold, water buffalo grazing, elephants logging, and several tiny settlements of palm-thatched or corrugated-iron-thatched wooden huts, with both rice and corn fields carefully planted along the apparently very fertile soil along the river's banks.   The soil is very rich in nutrients, needs no fertiliser or chemicals and can grow three crops of rice in a year.

Part-way through the first day on the river, we stopped to visit the village of one of the 40-plus ethnic minority groups in Laos - the Khmu in this case - who live in the kind of village you might expect to see Orla Guerlin fronting in a BBC news clip.   The village comprised several palm-thatched wooden huts on stilts - some of them very dilapated indeed - with chickens and piglets running around in the dirt, alongside several dozen happy, smiling, very curious young children.   About the only obvious, but significant, difference from one of Orla Guerlin's broadcasts was that these children, and the teenagers and adults who generally kept their distance from us, seemed very well-fed and content.   We were shown their 'sticky-rice'-making technology (basically, a couple of young girls constantly pounding a couple of very heavy-looking, worn-smooth tree-branches, which they wielded vertically, dropping them rhythmically with a huge thud into the rice spread out on a rattan mat in the dirt.)   Intrepid Travel have an arrangement with the Khmu, who tolerate our curiosity and intrusion in return for donations towards any supplies they cannot either make or grow for themselves.   The children themselves loved our attention, and gathered around our cameras, laughing and giggling when we showed them their own images on the various digital cameras our group had used.   Andy started to play a 'scaring' peek-a-boo game with some of them, walking in front of them and suddenly spinning round to make scary or menacing faces at them.   This they found absolutely hilarious, and fairly soon virtually all the village children were trotting behind him, waiting for his 'scary surprise', and then running away so fast, screaming and laughing, that they were falling and tumbling over each other in the dirt, but bouncing back each time, laughing and desperate for more - just like kids all over the world, who enjoy being scared (a little!).   By the time we got back to our boat, he looked just like the Pied Piper, with a whole pack of kids jostling for position to see this scary-monster leaping round and scowling. Such tremendous entertainment, so simply created! (No need of Nintendo MegaDrives and Sega GameBoys!).

After an overnight stop in another dirt-road, wooden-shacked, river-side village called Pak Beng (again being assisted with our luggage from the boat by hordes of young children), we set off on the second day of this wonderfully relaxing mode of transport towards Luang Prabang, stopping briefly for a visit to the Pak Ou caves.   These caves, overlooking the Mekong, contain hundreds of large and small Buddha statues, and each Lao New Year (April), followers attend the cave to wash and clean these statues, as one of the many ways of creating a better karma for themselves.

Just as we approached our destination of Luang Prabang, we had our first rain - not a particularly significasnt amount, but just enough to cause a huge rainbow to light up the last few hundred metres of our wonderful river-boat trip.   A perfect end to a perfect two days!



River Border Crossing, Thailand to Laos



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Young Traders Throng to the Boat on the Mekong



Mr Sing Introduces the 'New Boss' of the Arimid Guest House



Pied Piper Starts his Collection



Pied Piper Gets a Send-Off