ASIA - LAOS: THREE MEN IN A BOAT ON THE MEKONG
by Robert Tilley







Twelve hundred Baht ($28 US) for a three-day outing to the Golden Triangle and a 450 kilometre voyage down the mighty Mekong as far as Luang Prabang? The boat looked quite comfortable and even romantic on the glossy picture shown to us by the young woman behind the travel agency desk. And the riverside guesthouse where we would be spending the first night would match our expectations, she assured us. Even “American breakfast” was included in the deal.

All that for the cost of a night out in Chiang Mai? There had to be a catch somewhere. And there was.

The minibus ride to Chiang Khong, our overnight stop on the Thai side of the Mekong, was an auspicious enough start to the Mekong trip. The bus was unexpectedly new and not overcrowded, and the undulating road through the mountains to Chiang Rai provided enough big scenery to help the miles and the hours pass pleasantly.

The half-way house had been spruced up since I last called two years ago, and if we’d had time to spare, the lavatory installations included big tubs where weary travellers can soak their limbs in mineral-rich water from nearby hot springs.

We had to push on, however. The Mekong beckoned and we wanted to watch the setting sun gild its turbid waters.

But comfort also slipped below the horizon at Chiang Khong, where our party of four were ushered into a dormitory-like room which had that minimalist, slightly soiled character of a prison cell. I half expected to see marks on the grubby walls marking off the days, months and years.

The one woman in the party was the only member of the group who didn’t complain. But she is Thai, after all.

Our two male companions declared they couldn’t possibly share a room with somebody who snored like an elderly hog – each of them pointing accusatory fingers at the other. One or both had snored with such stentorian sonority while sharing a room during a Bangkok stopover that even the backpackers had complained to the management.

But our dormitory came with an uninterrupted view of the Mekong, across whose mud-brown surface we skipped the next morning in a tiny skiff propelled by a five-cylinder Honda engine powerful enough to have got our craft from Thailand to Laos without once touching the water if the ferryman had given the throttle an extra twist.

The ferry crossing from Chiang Khong to the Laotian riverside town of Ban Houayxai is an important link in a huge United Nations-backed project called the “Asian Highway”. The road north of Ban Houayxai leads to the Chinese province of Yunnan, while Chiang Khong offers a gateway to northern Thailand and the highway south to Bangkok and beyond.

When Thailand, China and Laos can get the money together they intend to build a bridge linking Chiang Khong and Ban Houayxai. “But goodness knows when that will be”, sighs U.N. official Barry Cable, British-born director of the agency department overseeing the Asian Highway project.

For now, the Asian Highway’s route through China and Laos plunges down a steep incline in Ban Houayxai and ends at a muddy jetty where flimsy river boats jostle for space with chunky, rusting flatbed pontoon ferries and cargo barges en route from China to southern Laos and Cambodia.

So where was the boat that was to take us on a two-day voyage down the Mekong to Luang Prabang? Nothing in the harbour resembled in any way the dinky little river boat pictured in the Chiang Mai travel agency.

The prospect of being stranded in Ban Houayxai, where the principal pastime seems to be swatting mosquitoes, was even more uninviting than the perfunctory summons we received to join a queue of mostly ragged-assed backpackers clambering aboard a boat which made the African Queen look like the Queen Mary.

The strange craft was an extended version of the narrow “long-tail” boats that zip busily around the waterways of Bangkok. But with this important difference – tourists are subjected to the discomforts of a Bangkok long-tail boat for an hour or two at the most. Two full days, with an overnight stop at a Mekong river settlement, lay ahead of us.

There were other important differences. You can actually sit in a Bangkok long-tail boat, on port-to-starboard benches with backrests and even cushions. Our craft was so slim that the “seating” ran around the gunwales, a six-inch shelf of bum space some nine inches above the water.

As we boarded, the Rough Guide readers were already clambering onto the roof, tipped off by the backpackers’ grapevine that this was the place to be to top up a tan and to ensure a quick escape if the top-heavy craft actually turned turtle.

The elderly and infirm were helped down to the main (and only) deck. That included us – two elderly travellers of sixty-plus, a 55-year-old and a Thai woman companion complaining of severe back pains caused by a backpack stuffed with enough underclothes for a world tour.

Bottoms shifted uneasily along the gunwale bench as more and more travellers were packed into the creaking craft. Plastic garden chairs were unpacked and set up in the free space between the two rows of voyagers, packed neatly now like sardines in a wooden box. Heads, arms and legs protruded like disjointed dolls from the pile of assorted luggage at the stern.

Each tuk-tuk and songthaew that pulled up at the slipway with late arrivals was greeted with groans of dismay and disbelief. “Catch the next one”, went up the cry. “But that’s tomorrow”, came the reply.

Departure was delayed still further by a suited official on the make, who clambered over and through the entwined limbs demanding 50 Baht (just over a dollar US) “insurance”. Three parsimonious, protesting Brits caused a further 30 minute delay by refusing to pay – a bit short-sighted of them in view of the evident risks of venturing even one yard from shore. If they had only known of the dangers facing them on the 450 kilometer voyage ahead they would have been begging for adequate insurance.

As the sun crept higher towards whatever served as the yardarm on this strange vessel we cast off and swung out in a lopsided arc into the middle of the river. Somewhere in the curtained-off area that served as the engine room a big Honda motor roared into life and off we shot, at a brisk twenty knots, helped along by the swirling current of the Mekong.

I reached for a can of beer, but then had second thoughts. The can was warm to the touch. But, more importantly, the boat lacked any kind of lavatory. Not only strong nerves were required on this trip. Strong bladders, too. And at least one of our small party had prostate trouble.

Half an hour under way, we were overtaken by a Laotian river barge, with about a half a dozen passengers travelling in comparative style tween-decks. Two Farangs gave us a cheery wave and signalled for us to join them. What, all three score of us?

But at the first river settlement where our boat made landfall we snuggled up against the barge and sent the Thai member of our small team to look into the possibility of jumping ship. “No problem”, she said after conferring in Lao with the captain. “For 300 Baht (US$7) each he’ll take us to Luang Prabang”.

I’ve rarely seen money change hands so quickly. The transfer of backpacks from one vessel to the other took more time, but while our former captain was still searching the jungle for passengers who had gone looking for sustenance or a secluded tree against which to pee, we four mutineers settled down on rush mats for an onward journey of relative comfort and ease.

Our fellow passengers were the two Farangs, Danish NGO (non-governmental organization) workers who roared off on their motorbike into the jungle at our next stop, and a few Laotian women returning home from shopping trips up-country.

The entire upper deck and half our open-sided, four-foot high “saloon”, was taken up by beer crates, rattling with thousands of bottles destined for Laos’s one and only brewery, in Vientiane. The bottles, though, were empty. Here we were on a boat where it was safe to down a few beers and there were none to open. Sod’s law reigns even here in the jungle.

Our boat represented the only means of transport between the wild northeastern territory of Laos and the World Heritage city of Luang Prabang. No roads pierce the towering mountain ranges of this region, and if it weren’t for the Mekong most of the few communities here would be living stone-age existences.

The Asian Development Bank, which is investing heavily in the Mekong region, describes this mountainous stretch of Asia’s wildest river as one of the last frontiers of tourism.

One thousand years ago, Europe had a river just like this. Robber barons built their castles atop the enclosing cliffs and on rocky outcrops in the river below. Then came the first tourists, Victorian pioneers, and riverside inns sprang up to cash in legally on the travelling trade. Paved roads and railways followed – and the Rhine gorge as we know it today took shape.

The Mekong between the Golden Triangle and Luang Prabang is a tropical vision of how the Rhine Gorge must have looked at the turn of the first millennium. The sinuous waterway snakes swiftly through narrow channels enclosed by high, jungle-clad mountains and banks of yellow sand, huge slabs of mud-rock and the occasional patch of cultivated ground nuts, bamboo and mulberry.

Our unseen captain steered his shallow-draught barge through rapids and whirlpools, skirting islets and sharp-toothed rocky outcrops with the skill of an Olympic canoeist. The empty beer bottles rattled nervously in their crates with every turn of the wheel, and his human freight flopped back and forth across the narrow deck like rolls of carpet.

Trips to the hole-in-the-deck lavatory at the stern involved clambering through the engine room, through pools of oil and past whirling fly wheels. The square-cut hole enjoyed the privacy of a lean-to shed three-foot square and four-foot high. Sharing this suitably named poop deck was the galley – an open charcoal brazier, a pile of battered pots and pans and a sack of rice.

Somewhere en route our original boat had passed us and was unloading its own freight of weary passengers as we made landfall for the night at the tiny riverside settlement of Pakbeng. Our Lao fellow passengers elected to sleep on the boat’s hard deck, but we went looking for a mattress and a cold shower, guided by the village “porters” – tiny kids who had swarmed over the arriving boats, fighting with each other for possession of the Farangs’ backpacks and the 20 Baht they would earn by humping them up the steep, muddy incline of Pakbeng’s solitary street.

Installed in Pakbeng’s top hostelry (200 Baht, or some $5 US, a night for a double room, with private shower, fan and mosquito net), we gathered for cold beers on a rude teak terrace perched high above the darkening Mekong and swapped notes with travellers who had endured the eight-hour voyage in the boat from which we had escaped.

They had survived the trip with amazing bounce and were totally unfazed by the prospect of a further eight hours of hell on high water on the second stage to Luang Prabang the next day.

“You really missed some fun”, said a young German woman. “Our captain had to beat people off the roof with a cane whenever we approached a police post”.

Now wait a minute – hadn’t our travel agent described the Mekong river trip as “unbeatable”? Well, I suppose that in many senses it really was.





Photo courtesy Mark Angelo
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