Indochina Day 5, Laos and Boat Ride on the Mekong

Wednesday June 1^st

We were up, fed and checked out by 7:30 in order to load up in a pickup truck for the short ride to the border post. We waited twenty minutes until the station opened up and then we exited Thailand. We took a short ride on a boat across the Mekong River to the Laos side. Richard lined up with our passports to get us our visas while we waited with our new local guide Louis. When we got our visas we made a trip to the local ATM and then loaded up in tuk tuks for the ride back to the river and our river boat for the next two days. These boats are very long, about a hundred feet and narrow, maybe eight feet. There is a steering area at the front, followed by a seating area, an eating area, a bar, a toilet and finally a couple of rooms at the back where the family who owns and runs the boat, live.

Before boarding, I bought a bag of fruit for the trip. I got tiny sweet bananas, leechie nuts, mangoseed (nothing to do with mangoes), mandarins, and rambutan.

The Mekong River is one of the most important rivers in Asia and 12^th longest in the world. It originates in Tibet and runs through China to get here. It is a major artery for Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. South East Asia is now having problems as China has recently put a number of dams on the Mekong for hydroelectric power generation and are planning to build more. This is causing water flow problems down river. Last year in the dry season, for the first time in recorded history the river was unnavigable for the section we are travelling on these two days.

We drove down the river for a couple of hours watching the beautiful low mountain scenery and the life of the locals on the river. Then we stopped and visited a local Khamo Lao village. It was located at the top of a sandbank. This a pretty basic village of the Theung ethnic group. They traditionally live up in the mountains, but the government is trying to get them to move down to the river bank to try to get them to stop the slash and burn type of agriculture they do. They don’t grow sticky rice in rice paddies, but rather on the hills. But they have to slash and burn the vegetation to clear the field. Also by moving them down they can offer them education and health care. The village, called Houey Palam Khamo Village, just got electricity three years ago and by the next year they had satellites, a road and scooters. However, they are still climbing the mountain to continue their agricultural methods. We had a tour there for about an hour and I had lots of opportunity for great people shots.

Then we re-boarded the boat and had a good lunch cooked for us by the boat family. We continued riding down the river. We got to our destination, Pakbeng, by 4:30 and checked into our very nice guest home. We sat in the bar and a had a beer together before going on a walk through the town. The town is very small and basically consists of one long road with lots of guest houses and restaurants on it, as this is a fairly touristy town. Not that there is much for tourists to do, in fact nothing other than eat and drink, but because the river boats have to dock at night and this town is the only one on the river when people can stay. After our walk Richard took us to a restaurant that a friend of his owns and we had a pretty good Laos meal. Everyone had a couple of drinks before heading back to the guest house for the night.