We had formed a plan of how to spend our last week in South-East Asia. We would visit just 2 more cities, Chiang Mai and Bangkok in Thailand before catching our flight out to Auckland, New Zealand. However, our journey to get there would be part of the adventure. People who blog travel details (not like me who is including very little detail on costs, timings, logistics etc.) are invaluable to the internet-savvy traveller, and we were reliably (we hoped) informed that we could save ourselves lots of money if we took this local boat service, without booking anything in advance through an agency. This, we thought, could be a lot of fun and would introduce a measure of unpredictability into our travels which could make for some interesting stories!
However, we fell at the first hurdle, and caved into buying our boat ticket from our hostel in advance, which included a tuk-tuk transfer to the boat port. Hilariously, this has been moved from a convenient in-town location to about 10km out, purely, it seems, to increase local tuk-tuk revenue.
Anyway, nothing else had been booked, so we consoled ourselves that we weren’t total failures at being thrifty travellers and that we would at least be finding accommodation for both nights (day 1 would take us as far as Pak Beng, and day 2 would see us reach Huay Xai) once we arrived at each respective port, and we hadn’t got any transport arranged to get us from Huay Xai across the border to Chiang Khong and on to Chiang Mai.
The boat ride itself was about as eventful as you’d expect two 8-hour boat journeys to be. We chatted a bit with our fellow travellers (the population of the boat was about 50% locals and 50% foreign tourists), read books, wrote blog posts, listened to podcast and quite enjoyed some relaxing time staring out of the boat at the jungle bordering the river.
Occasionally the boat would pull in to a river-beach and a local would hop off or on in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. I’m assuming there was a village at each point somewhere nearby, hidden in the middle of the jungle in Northern Laos. The most excitement came on one such occasion when the boat dropped off a passenger, and then tried to move back out into the current. It quickly became apparent that despite furious revving of the engines (followed by them cutting out) that we had become grounded and were stuck!
Some local fisherman brought their boat over to lend a hand, and waded out in only knee-deep water to push at the back of the boat. It didn’t budge. The crew of the boat brought out long bamboo poles and pushed at the bank and the river-bed trying to push the boat out. It didn’t budge. Us tourists were instructed (by a series of frantic hand signals) to move from our seats further back on the boat, and move to the front so they could make the back lighter. Still the boat didn’t budge.
At this point the captain motioned one of the other crew to take the helm, took his shorts off revealing a pair of ‘tighty whiteys’ and ran to the back of the boat, jumped in and proceeded to assist the fishermen with pushing. The boat began to move out into the river. However, the captain needed to clamber back on board and ran, soaking wet and dressed in only a pair of underpants, slipped over with a thud, got back up and made his way through a throng of gaping tourists to take the wheel at the front of the boat again, started up the engine and manoeuvred the boat back out into safer waters. A slightly disturbing yet hilarious sequence not quickly forgotten!
Logistically, the trip worked out fine. We were greeted at Pak Beng at the end of the first day on the boat by a whole group of local guesthouse and hotel owners who were all competing for our business, some even armed with laminated pictures of their rooms. Mel and I selected one based purely on photos and his proximity to us, and he lead us up the road. The pictures did actually do it justice. Well, that was easy! The place even had wifi, and we managed to find a cheap guesthouse in the centre of Huay Xai which we could book online, so had that sorted for our second night as our boat pulled into the town harbour we were glad to make the short walk into town. (The Laotian tuk-tuk cartel obviously hadn’t got as much influence here).
Waking up in Huay Xai we took a tuk-tuk to the border, a ‘friendship bridge’ over the Mekong and exited Laos. We spent the last of our Laotian Kip on breakfast and a ticket for the shuttle bus which takes you over the bridge to the Thai immigration check, and passed through that with no issues. However, we still had no transport arranged to get us to Chiang Mai.
It turns out not even our lack of bus planning makes a good story, as, waiting for us as we came out past the border checks, was a taxi booking kiosk. We tried to arrange a tuk-tuk to the bus station as we knew there was a direct bus from Chiang Khong to Chiang Mai which would be a cheap and easy way to get there, but when they heard where we were going, they offered us the last two seats on a minibus transfer going directly from the border to Chiang Mai for a similar price as the bus ticket! A lady we had met on the boat was slightly peeved by this, as she had paid a much larger amount to an agency to pre-book this very same minibus. Hah! We had finally achieved some measure of savvy traveller skills. Wahay!
Melanie and Colin Go Travelling 