Sarah & Richard's Travels

We have finally arrived in Luang Prabang after two long days on a slow boat from the border with Thailand. Our journey started in Chiang Mai where we took a bus up to the border town which was around 4hours away. Apart from the cat we hit near Chiang Koek (the border town) it was a pretty uneventful journey and we were thankful to have a guesthouse all included so we could go to sleep straight away after our 1am arrival.

It was up at 7am to be driven the short distance to the border which was right on the Mekong river which is the border for a proportion of Laos and Thailand. THe border was like a little building with about 500m to the river for the crossing. Once we'd 'checked out' of Thailand it felt as though you could just calmly walk away back into Thailand with no problems. It looked the same in Laos on the other side. We took a little long tail boat over the river to Laos where we had no problems getting our visa on arrival and entering Laos. This was where the waiting started.

We hung around for about an hour waiting for various people and for a truck to take us to the ferry terminal. The rust bucket finally turned up and took us a short ride where we were told we would have a 10 minute wait. 2 hours later we were almost ready to leave having waited for people to turn up in dribs and drabs in various forms of transport.

I was thankful to have 'invested' 40 baht in a cushion as the seats on the boat were moveable wooden plank benches, some of which wobbled rather ominously when we sat down...

We arrived in the tiny town of Pak Beng around 6.30pm at which time it was dark so finding our bags was an interesting experience considering everyone had warned everyone of bag scams with they take your bags and charge you a fee to get them back. This of course created paranoia with everyone and meant chaos whe trying to find and get the bags off the boat!

There's pretty much nothing to do in Pak Beng except have dinner and go to sleep which is what we did, it's a really sleepy town and only has electricity (from generators) between 6pm and midnight, so too bad if you want to stay up later...find a candle!

The next day was another long wait having been told the boat would leave at 9am we were ready on the boat at 8.45 with everyone else, but of course it didn't leave until 10.15! It was another long slow day, but luckily this time the drunk, loud Australians from the day before were sufficiently hungover to be quiet for most of the day...

We stopped at one point to pick someone up and some Canadian guy jumped in for a swim, the earful he got from the lady afterwards (in Laos of course) was hilarious and provided the entertainment for the day. She looked and sounded pretty angry, but the turned around to walk towards to bow and had a little smile on her face...

We arrived in Luang Prabang a little earlier in the light and managed to find a guesthouse pretty easily. See next update for the rest of Luang Prabang.