I don't know if I'll ever be able to convey how fun this has been. I feel so fortunate to be getting this experience, despite an unadvertised hike and an unadvertised swim during our cruise down the Mekong River.
On Sunday morning I left Chiang Mai, Thailand by van with a lot of reluctance. The night markets and the atmosphere of the old city and the sois in the morning made me want to stay awhile longer. The drive was about 6 hours through the mountains heading northwest to the small town of Chiang Khong on the border with Laos at Houayxai. I took a room at the $6 bungalows where the van put us off, and I started to regret that I was taking three days of surface travel to get where I was going. The further into unfamiliar territory I get, the more I become part of the package tours and well-beaten paths, and my traveling companions are mostly kids 15 years younger who don't often make a great first impression. And most of the conversation is strangely repetitive -- how far, how long, how much. I'm the odd man out not just because of my age but because of how short my trip is -- only two-and-a-half weeks. Most of these guys are on the trail for 6 months or more, spending weeks and months at each stop. They think taking a $6 room for myself is extravagant.
One girl from Belgium told about meeting someone from Liverpool, and they've decided to travel together for awhile. She says casually, "We've been through a lot together." It sounded like a platitude, but then she went on to list several misadventures, any one of which would have made me call off my trip -- motorbike wrecks, sleeping in hotel lobbies, run ins with the police, stitches, stolen passports, cellphones, cameras. "At least I didn't get me ATM card stolen," she said. "Though I did lose it later on."
I didn't have the confidence to hoof it down to the ferry in the morning and navigate my way across, through immigration and onto a boat. I signed on for the package. Because I signed up late, I was regularly two steps behind for awhile. Passports usually get sent through in a batch, and mine wasn't in it, so my group and guide ferried across without me, got a tuk tuk to the slow boat without me, etc. After awhile I started to think my name was, "Hey-he-made-it."
We shoved off at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, about 80 of us I think, but there was plenty of room to move around. The boats have a handful of comfy seats up front, first come, first served, but the consensus after awhile is that sitting there makes you less sociable. Most people move around a lot getting to know their fellow passengers. Some of them, I was just as glad not to know -- the ones laden with bottles of counterfeit Johnny Walker and Stolichnaya or who showed up glassy eyed after meeting up with the tuk tuk drivers in the shadows the night before. But I had a good time playing guitar with two lads from Leeds, talking literature and movies and politics with 2 kids from Slovenia, talking American football with a Danish girl who had been an exchange student in South Dakota. There was only one other American on the boat and a few Canadians. Everyone wants me to answer for Bush.
We had a lot of time to talk -- 8 or 9 hours each of the two days to cover 300 kilometers, and by about noon on the second day, I had to resist a persistent urge to jump in and swim the rest of the way. But the views along the way were unforgettable. I'm tempted to describe it as a wild river, but I know that technically that means an un-dammed river, and the effects of damming upstream in China were the most prominent feature. We rode low in the riverbed, poking along slowly from one side to the other to find the deepest channels.
But it looked wild to me. Enormous rocks and sandbars and beaches bordered us on each side, and the mountains walled us in. We saw almost no signs of habitation -- presumably the villages were just out of sight over the bank. But every half hour or so we'd come across a handful of people doing some kind of work down at the bank -- fishing, digging for shellfish, washing clothes, panning for gold. There was a constant haze from the slash and burn field prep on the mountainside.
About half-way down the first day, we had a little bit of an adventure. The water was too low, and the captain pulled in along a sand dune and started gesturing for us to get out. I should say, this is one of the few situations I've been in where none of our guides spoke any English. For two days we were dependent on speculation and sign language. The only passenger who was a local, a monk, started hiking down river over the dunes, and the captain kept yelling "Go!" So we followed the monk. (Our guess was that the captain needed to lighten the load to get over the rapids, but it turns out we actually needed to hike down to another boat that met us below the rapids, and our bags were ferried down on skiffs.)
We hiked over the riverbed for about 15 minutes and were having a good laugh about our little adventure. "They didn't say anything about this because at the guest house." I remember pausing to take a picture of the long line of us strong across the rocks. Then a few minutes later I turned around to take another picture, and I see a rain cloud squeezing down the valley toward us. A minute later we're in a sandstorm unable to see where we're walking, and then a minute after that we're in a downpour. It was the first drop of rain I had seen in about 12 weeks, and I had forgotten there was such a thing.
Just about then we arrive where the next boat is waiting at a sandbar just across a tiny little puddle that we'll have to cross over. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat is banging into the skiffs and pulling against its mooring, which is just a stake in the sand, and the captain and the ferryman are all yelling at one another. The gangplank is wobbling all over the place, and everyone is afraid to climb it, so traffic is backing up on the sandbar. As we get down to the bank, it turns out the puddle is deeper than expected and people are going up to their thighs. In a flash, like an animal instinct perhaps, all the European men have their pants off. It was like a United Nations of weird underwear. Some people are tripping and going down in the puddle. I saw one girl who had a streak of sand across her teeth and gums before it was over.
I got across safely with my camera dry, but like everyone was caked in wet sand. Once we got on the boat, because the tarps had been let down the sides, it was too dark to see, and we were like panicked cattle looking for our backpacks to find our jackets. Once we got underweigh, and the rain stopped and the tarps came up, we were pretty cold, which is something else I had forgotten could happen. Later on we talked to some people traveling upriver, and they said they got hail, so I guess we were lucky to miss that.
We put in for the night at the half-way point, Pakbeng, a trading post for carrying goods from Thailand into the interior. There are only 200 families there, the one road is only half paved, and they just got electricity a couple years ago. Down by the river, almost all the activity is guest houses and restaurants for the boats full of tourists. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to look around the village any. It was pitch dark by the time we were done showering and feeding on second helpings at the cafes.
The 9 hours the next day was less eventful and even a little bit sunny for some of it. More great scenery, long passages with no sign of life and the regular reminder of big the world is. We arrived at Luang Prabang just at dusk, and the town makes a great impression that way.
-Robert
