The long and winding road - Luang Prabang, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
Luang Prabang, Lao Peoples Dem Rep
The first leg of our journey began in the ticket office in the centre of Pai. We waited here for someone to come and collect us and walk us through the streets to the waiting minivan, as the roads were closed for the night markets. There was only me and Jo, a family of 4 with 2 young girls, and a couple from Holland, so we were pretty pleased as we set off that we all had plenty of space. The family were from Australia and were traveling around Asia while the girls, who were 10 and 11 were on their 6 week school holidays for their summer. They were a lovely family and were telling us all about their travels, and the time they took a year out of school to travel around Europe in a motorhome. They have had so many more experiences than me and Jo put together, it was amazing listening to a young persons take on the world.
The chatting and comfort didn't last long though. As we knew from the way here, the road between Pai and Chiang Mai is pretty windy, but we weren't quite prepared for the experience were about to have. The driver clearly fancied himself as some sort of Thai Lewis Hamilton, and took it upon himself to get us to Chiang Mai in nearly half the time it should. The only comparison I can offer to people at home is that it was like going round the bends round Haigh, if they were twice as sharp, going 90 miles an hour, down a mountain, and driving on the wrong side of the road with a crazy Thai guy at the wheel. Safe to say everyone felt pretty nauseous and it wasn't long before 3 people around us were being sick into carrier bags. Jo and I spent the next hour with earphones in, music blasting, and our scarves covering our noses, trying not to fall off our seats. When we arrived at the halfway stop, everyone piled out the bus for some much needed fresh air and solid ground. The driver found it rather amusing that we were all so I'll, and despite people telling him we would be OK if he drove slower, he just handed out more bags and ushered us back into the van. The next part of the journey wasn't quite as bad and we all managed to make it to the next stop without any incidents. We arrived at a service station and were told we had 20 minutes break before changing busses. We were of course incredibly early and waited nearly an hour before the next minivan arrived. This at least gave us chance to find all our belongings which had been rolling round on the floor on the journey down.
The next minivan was pretty much the same, except it had 5 or 6 people already sat in it. This left 6 spare seats which we realized, much quicker than the driver, wasn't going to fit 8 of us in. He pointed to the front seat, saying '1 person', which still wasn't going to work. In the end no the me and Jo climbed into the front, and quickly realized why he had only said there was one seat there. The other one was probably a folded out armrest, as it was rock hard and had barely any legroom. Still, it was a better journey than the first part and we even managed to get a bit of sleep in the 4-5 hours it took to get to Chiang Khong, the town on the Thai border. We arrived here just before 2am, and were all desperate for some proper sleep, feeling a little more reassured that we at least had accommodation provided for us tonight, included in our ticket. This was probably the wrong feeling to have.
We had pulled up at a little guesthouse where the receptionist had clearly waited up for our arrival. We unloaded all our bags and followed her what appeared to be the opposite way to all the rooms. This is because it was. She led us back down the street and round the corner to some large warehouse type doors. Two women were waiting inside for us, and let us in to what had been converted into a series of long rooms, filled with single beds and a few mattresses on the floor, divided up by some single curtains hanging between the beds. One woman took the family into the next room which had 4 beds. Then she asked how man of us there were so Jo said 2, and she pointed to 2 beds at the beginning of the row. The next group had 5 people together, and she pointed to 5 beds, including the ones she had pointed to for us. We suggested we went in the next room which had only 2 beds, so the big group could all be together, but the 2 guys from the group had already gone in and shut the door. We all gave up and just climbed into bed, with the woman taking a while to realize that she was still one bed short. There had obviously been some miscounting along the way. We all just got under the covers and tried to settle down for what we knew would be only a few hours sleep.
Aside from being woken by the cat fighting with something or other at some point in the night, we both slept fairly well until we were woken at around 7am to go for breakfast before we continued our journey. As everyone wore the same clothes as the day before, getting ready involved minimal effort, apart from the surprisingly challenging task of finding a sink, which despite 3 bathrooms, appeared to be none existent, so we brushed our teeth in a hose in the back yard. Breakfast was scrambles egg with onion and tomato in, with 2 slices of toast, and we ate with a view across the river of Laos. We finished and then went to collect our bags, which we were told to load into the back of a pickup truck. It then became clear that we were also supposed to fit in the truck too, so we perched on the sides and held on to whatever we could. Border control was only a few minutes away thankfully, and we were dropped off, before the pickup went back to pick up more groups who had also arrived the night before.
At the border, we had to get our passports stamped out of Thailand before crossing the river to Laos immigration. Upon entry to Thailand, most tourists are granted a 30 day visa which is date stamped in your passport. Our visa expired on the 10th December and it was now 8am on the 11th Dec. This is not an uncommon problem between backpackers, but does mean that the border officials can be a little unfriendly, and you need to make certain measures to avoid them threatening deportation. We had tried to book a bus to get us here a day earlier, but after an unexpectedly busy weekend in Pai they were all full of people with the same idea, so we had little option. So we were at the border with the guard questioning our visa dates. The signs around the counter state that the fine for overstating a visa is 500 baht (around 10 GBP) per day, and even though we were only a few hours into the day, he insisted we pay a full days fee. Anyone who has experience of Thailand will know there can be a little corruption within some officials, so we were not too surprised when our money went straight into the Guards own bag on the desk next to him. We have no idea if we paid a charge or a bribe, but either way our passport was stamped with no problems and we were allowed to leave the country.
We were then directed to a very narrow longboat, which was accessed by a rather thin plank of wood. This is not the easiest when carrying a backpack and a day pack, but somehow we all ended up inside a slightly lopsided boat. There seemed a lot of concentration on collecting little tickets we had all been carefully issued upon showing our receipts, which took a good 5 minutes. The ticket collector then waved the boat off, screwing the tickets up and throwing them in the water at his feet as he did so. Thai paperwork at its finest. The journey to Houay Xi, on the Laos bank of the river took less than a minute, and we were soon clambering out the boat and being greeted by a man who claimed to be our tour operator for this part of the journey. He issued us with immigration forms to be completed, and directed us to the right counter. We had to give in our completed forms and a passport photo of ourselves, then wait for our names to be called to get our passports back. It took about 10 minutes for mine to be returned with both an entry stamp and a full page visa. Jo's took another 20 minutes or so despite being handed in with mine. They clearly didn't like the look of her. We had to wait until most people were done, which took a while as by now it was a group of around 50 people. Some of these were taking the bus to Luang Prabang rather than the slow boat like us, so they headed off first, before our guide explained what was happening next.
We were to be taken to 'his house' to wait for the boat to be ready. There was no fixed time for the boat to leave, it would depend on how long everyone's visa process took, but our journey time would be around 7 hours, and he could order us sandwiches from the pier as there would be no stops on the boat. We were then led to the top of the street to a lime of waiting tuk tuks, which this time were like pickup trucks with seats down either side, and a roof onto which our bags were loaded.
A few minutes later we were dropped of at a small shop which had a large area of benches and tables for people to wait on. We waited around 15 minutes, buying drinks and snacks to take onto the boat, until the guide arrived again. He gave us a fairly long speech about our journey, and how to make sure we had a good time in his country, and enjoyed our holiday. He told us he was going to give us a great journey today. He would give us all seat numbers, which would be over 2 boats as we had a lot of people. He collected all our passports to issue our boat tickets, then told us it was the last time we would need to hand them in, and to be careful of people asking to see our passports when we arrive in the next town as they may run off with them. He also advised us to be aware of guest houses having spare keys to our rooms, as they might go in when we are out and go through bags: basically don't go out! We would be spending the night in Pakbeng, which was basically just a stop over town for people doing this journey up and down the Mekong. The guide, of course, had a reccomended guest house to offer us, but with the promise of a warm shower, WiFi and only 500baht per night, we decided we would be glad of having the room sorted, and booked a room. He told us we would all have our passports and tickets back in around 20 minutes, then we would be on our way.
An hour later, we were finally ready, and walked down to the dock together, unsurprisingly, we all ended up on the same boat, with his carefully prepared seat numbers barely lasting seconds before people were sitting anywhere there was space. There were 2-3 seats together down each side of the boat, fitting over 100 people on in total. The seats were old style train seats, not fixed to the floor, just lined up at close intervals. We managed to find 2 with decent leg room for us, and towards the front which meant away from the engine room! We had heard many horror stories about awful journeys on the slow boat, which mainly revolved around being sat in the extremely noisy and hot engine room. We were eventually on our way, with the 2 boats worth of people crammed on the one boat, so some unlucky people ended up sat on plastic kids patio chairs which appeared from somewhere and were placed in whatever makeshift aisle space there was. Despite that, it was actually a pretty nice journey.
The scenery down the Mekong River was beautiful, and as the sides of the boat were open (there was a solid roof but no windows) everyone was taking lots of pictures as we passed on our way. With a long journey ahead Jo and I settled in with our kindles to catch up on some reading which we haven't found much time to do so far (we are both on our 5th books in 5 weeks!) The river was pretty smooth, and we didn't mind not stopping so were glad of our sandwiches and crisps we had bought beforehand. About 3 hours into the journey, the engines went off in the middle of the river, and a small speedboat started to pull up along side. Everyone was standing up to see what was happening, before 3 Lao guys walked in with large yellow crates on their shoulders. A big cheer went out as people realised they had done a beer run! Jo and I decided to play a few card games, although we were struggling to think of 2 player games as we have been used to playing in groups. We started playing rummy, and the guys around us took an interest in trying to work out the rules. They were trying to ask us how to play, so in the end we taught a guy from Italy and a guy from Pennsylvania in turns, with their friend watching quietly and looking confused. We did manage a successful game with each of them, at which point we all decided it would be a good point to join the rest of the boat and indulge in a beer lao. The rest of the journey was fairly uneventful, and we even arrived 2 hours early!
We were met from the boat by a pickup truck to take us to our pre booked room. We managed to get the two seats in the cab, rather than with the 20+ people stood up in the back of the truck with their bags. We arrived at the guest house and were quickly assigned a room. It seemed pretty big with clean decent beds, which were pretty hard but still quite comfy. The warm shower we were promised was a slightly different matter however. The shower had no head on it, so we were left with a tiny hosepipe like trickle, which was in no way warm. Still at this point a shower was still a shower so after a quick wash we went in search of food. We ended up in the first restaurant we came across, as the rest of the street seemed fairly dark, so we decided to settle on Indian. We ordered chicken tikka thinking it was quite a safe option, but it was so spicy we had to ask for yoghurt to calm it down a little. We went to sleep fairly quickly afterwards, knowing we had another long day ahead.
The next morning we got up before 7 so we could eat breakfast and be down at the pier for 8am to make sure we got seats on the boat. We both said we felt a little unwell and assumed it was the tiredness of long days travelling catching up on us. We managed to find seats easily, as today there actually were 2 boats. We sat closer to the front with the Australian family, and the girls began telling us the stories of their travels and asking us all sorts of questions. Their parents were asking us about our plans for travelling and kindly gave us their details so we could meet up in Australia so they could give us advice on places to visit and somewhere to stay. The journey was very similar to the day before, but as the day went on we began to feel a little nauseous. I spent most of the journey sat on the floor in the wise of the boat, like a few other people, trying not to hurt my back as much as the last 2 day journey we did. This left Jo with both seats to put her feet up and we both tried to sleep as much as possible to avoid feeling any more sick. We eventually arrived in Luang Prabang at around 5pm, and were told we had to buy a tuk tuk ticket as it was actually 10km to the city centre this cost us 20,000kip each which is actually just under 2GBP. We asked to be dropped off in the Centre, and before our bags were unloaded someone had approached us offering us a room in his guest house for 80,000 kip a night. We still hadn't got our beds round the currency but we worked out this was about 3GBP each a night and still feeling fairly delicate the offer of a twin room with a private bathroom was too good to turn down.
48 very long hours later we had finally made it into Laos.