Rolling on the River

Pardon my typing this morning - I as still suffering from insulin shock from my breakfast! We had crepes with bananas and chocolate (and not cheap chocolate either - high quality stuff) this morning and man was it good. Probably our best breakfast yet :)

Chiang Khong

We woke up bright and early on Sunday morning, got ourselves a packed lunch from one of the guesthouses and headed to Thailand immigration. We got our exit stamp and piled onto a ferry to cross the Mekong River (which took all of 5 minutes). Once on the other side we were officially in Houie Xay in Laos. We took care of the Visa stuff (ended up costing 3100 baht instead of 3000 because it was a Sunday) and got into a truck and headed to the boat pier.

The Boat

I must admit, when we saw the boat I wasn't surprised. The seat were hard wooden benches. What I was surprised about was how many people the crammed into the thing. When all the benches were full they started to pull out plastic chairs. When all the chairs were full they sat people in the floor. Finally, after cramming about 150 people onto this boat, we set sail along the Mekong. The ride was beautiful, but you became distracted by the discomfort pretty early on. After about two hours your ass was officially numb and although you would think that being numb was a good thing - for some reason it still hurt. After a seven hour day we stayed in Pak Beng for the night. Here is where the story gets good.

Pak Beng

All I can say about this city is that I'm glad that I will never have to see it again. We decided to book our accommodations prior to getting on the boat so we could avoid the headache of trying to find a place to stay at 6pm along with the other 148 people on our boat. This proved to be a big mistake. We paid 300 baht for a double room with bath which would normally be a fairly reasonable price. When we saw the room I almost cried. We didn't even take a picture because frankly I don't want the memory of it. The bed was dirty, the hot water shower didn't work and there was writing on the wall from previous travelers. It went something like this...

"Over priced, vermin infested..."

"Don't stay, run with your lives..."

And this folks, was our first impression. We dropped off our bags and went and had dinner. As we were leaving the room Paul was offered various types of illegal narcotics. We thought this was odd until it happened every five minutes. I guess the people of Pak Beng are bored.

We called it an early night and hit the sack. We of course pulled out of sleep sacks and pillow cases for the evening. Around 11pm they turned the generators off which meant the fan went off as well. The room got very uncomfortable very quickly. I hadn't slept a wink of sleep and Paul maybe got an hour. I started to have a panic attack (I mean... why not??) which caused me to stay up for most of the night (and consequently Paul as well). Just as we were about to fall asleep the roosters started. Silly me, I thought roosters did their thing at dawn and not 3 in the morning. But man am I glad they woke us up because if we had been asleep we would have missed the best part of all... the rats. That's right... you heard me... RATS. At first Paul thought I was being paranoid. He said the noises that I heard were outside the room, but I of course knew better. At this point both of us were wide awake and knew that sleep was not in our future for that night. Paul decided that he would try to find the lighter (which was our only source of light - why we don't have a flashlight is beyond me) to see if he could see anything under the bed. He is such a brave man. Anyway, he finds the lighter and checks under the bed to find nothing. I felt a little better so we decided to try and fall asleep. This next part I didn't hear about until the morning...

I fell asleep almost right away but Paul had some more trouble. As he was just about to pass out he heard something crawl up his backpack and approach his head. As he lifted his head he heard something drop and hit the ground with a thud. This was all the proof he needed - we did indeed have rats. Being the nice guy he is, he decided not to wake me and tell me this. In total, we probably got about 2-3 hours sleep.

On the boat again

Yesterday we got up bright and early in hopes of getting a bench seat on the boat. We got down there about 8am and luckily there were still lots of spots. And the best part - these benches had cushions!! This made day two on the slow boat much more comfortable. I spent most of the day reading - I actually finished a whole book (Dead Even I think it was called) and Paul relaxed and took tons of pictures (which is just finished uploading so take a look). After 8 hours of boat riding we landed in Luang Prabang.

Luang Prabang

We arrived in Luang Prabang around 6 o'clock last night. Finding a guesthouse proved to be a little difficult, but we expected that. We paid way more then we wanted to spend for the night, but at least it was clean and the hot shower worked. We had a great dinner, toured around the fantastic night market and once again retired for an early evening. Bright and early this morning we went hunting for a new place to stay. We found a room just like the one we stayed in last night, but half the price. SCORE!

That's it for now. We should be in Luang Prabang for a few more days and then we're heading south.