Ze Boat From Hell

December 13, 2014

Beerlao flowin' like a river

Chiang Khong to boat landing in Laos 13 miles

Luang Prabang boat landing to guesthouse 6 miles

Dear little friends,

We warned you our pace would be leisurely, this is our vacation after all and charging through Asia was never on our agenda. So apologies for the scarcity of updates, I just read about Martin and Elspeth Jarman's sudden departure from New Zealand to be with family under very sad circumstances, after 600 days of touring they have only rarely missed a day of journaling, and it will be a big hole in my daily reading. Well done, Jarmans, what a fantastic trip and a fantastic journal!

On our second day in Chiang Khong we met Jocelyn and Michael Rice of "A Father-Daughter Tour around the World" and had a lot of fun eating Mexican food and tipping a shot of Thai vodka (surprisingly smooth!) with them. They are interesting and interested people, good world observers and have an astonishing number of miles on their tires, a real inspiration.

Michael and Jocelyn, the amazing Father-Daughter team.

We had to chuckle at our tiny bikes compared to their full-sized, very loaded tourers. They must be as strong as horses, and they cover 70 miles a day here in Thailand, so we felt weak and inadequate by comparison. But we can say that every time we get on our bicycles we feel stronger and more fit and that is saying something important for us.

Bruce discussed his Lyme Disease at the beginning of this blog, but I haven't mentioned yet the fact that I have a pulmonary condition called ARD, asbestos-related disease that stiffens the pleural lining around the lungs. It is an illness endemic to my home town of Libby, Montana, one of the most beautiful places in the world but sadly, severely contaminated by asbestos fibers from a nearby mine. The 40-year latency period came and went and I thought I would be fine but apparently not. There is no cure but it can be staved off with a very healthy diet and lots of cardio activity, something I try to remember as I pant up the hills of Thailand. I have also lost about 15 pounds so far on this trip, which is a lot to lose in 6 weeks but I feel great. The Burmese Diet Plan may be foiled by the Delicious Thai and Lao Food Un-Diet Plan. Time to get riding again! But if we seem to flag on our way, one or both of us is not feeling in the pink.

So back in Chiang Khong we lazed around and tried to get rid of Bruce's nagging cough. After a few days we were ready to move on so we got up early, loaded up the steeds and went on yet another Border Dash, this time to Houay Xai, Laos, on the opposite bank of the Mekong. From there we would catch the 11 am boat down to Luang Prabang, a 2 day voyage that Michael and Jocelyn had just taken upstream. We have taken the upstream version several times and always enjoyed it. The downstream one has a reputation for being crowded with backpackers making the banana pancake loop from Chiang Rai to Vang Vieng.

In the old days you went to the immigration buildings in either Chiang Khong or Houay Xai, checked out of the country, boarded a little 25-cent boat with yourself and your stuff and ferried across in ten minutes, tops. Then you checked into your new country and off to the guesthouse or the bus station. Simple dimple.

The bridge across the Mekong south of Chiang Khong.

A year ago this week the new bridge opened and immediately bike tourers had problems. They had to take the bridge but their bikes had to go by boat and all sorts of nonsense. They have straightened out some of the nonsense but it is still a huge racket to get most travelers to be required to taxi to and from the bridge which is several miles south of both towns. We zipped down to the bridge, checked out of Thailand, made a token resistance to putting our bikes on the shuttle bus, which we had to pay for of course, and unloaded on the other side.

For some reason Lao immigration, handling a crowd of foreign backpackers all with their passports and visa fees and photos at the ready, still managed to sit on their hands for awhile, it is very mysterious. There was a lot of conjecture among us who was the one with the passport that created the logjam, I was certain it was mine since my passport photo looks more like a pile of mashed potatoes than my actual face. The ones who probably had the most to worry about kept their mouths shut. We could see officials inside looking out at us, searching faces, making phone calls. They were probably just ordering their lunch food but it made us all shift uneasily from foot to foot.

After a too-long time we got our passports back and jumped on our bikes, convinced we would never make our boat time. We rode like the wind and got there in time and bought our tickets hurriedly and dumped our panniers into the keel space under the floor and the boat guys lifted the bikes onto the roof and tied them on. Bruce dashed up the road a bit and came back with two khao-ji pate (similar to Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches) and we were set!

But where were the folks we had seen at the border? Surely they would have been on a tuk-tuk and beaten us there. They were nowhere to be seen.

Slowly the boat filled up. Most of the passengers were farang (foreigners) and they packed us in like sardines. An hour later, passengers were still arriving. An hour and a half later the tuk-tuk arrived with our border friends, with no explanation as to why everybody was so late.

I don't think I want to talk much more about our two-day boat ride, let's just say that we were dying to get off that boat and are still recovering two days later. It was dangerously overcrowded, people were idiotically drunk and completely unaware of their positioning on a listing boat, and it all-around sucked. Never again.

Little gardens, newly planted as the river levels go down.

The Mekong still carries a lot of cargo traffic, but new bridges and dams will surely make these boats an endangered species.

One of the problems I see is that a lot of lazy backpackers buy package transportation to get from point A to point B, brokered by agents who get a commission. So they take zero responsibility for themselves, they've paid to be taken to point B and if they are too hungover to get their asses to the boat until an hour after it was supposed to have left, well, that's okay, because the boat won't leave without them or the boat company will lose business from the agents. This river run now has a party reputation, with the boat company selling beer on board to people with pretty low drinking skills, and that will continue until the boat runs become history with new roads available or a boat goes down killing not only the 80 or 90 foreign tourists shoveled aboard but also the hill tribe family with small children and a baby that were relegated to the deafening engine room. These boat routes are the public transportation option for the local people along the river, and their days are numbered by the greed and stupidity and corruption of the Lao officials that let the overcrowding and alcohol abuse continue.

Okay, so it wasn't all bad. This is the mouth of the Ou river.

Passenger boats in Pakbeng. Pakbeng is the halfway point on the two day boat ride between Houay Xai and Luang Prabang. It is notoriously wild and grimy, although it now has 24-hour electricity and fewer rats.

Note the bag o' ice for the days' drinking ahead.

There was a sweet moment though. And it was when we landed at the boat landing in Luang Prabang, now several miles from town (it used to land right in the heart of the river guesthouse area, so yet again, another tuk-tuk mafia racket) and while everybody else was bargaining with drivers, we were wheeling off on our bikes, talk about pure freedom.

The mad unloading scene that we soon left behind.

And we've enjoyed having them here in Luang Prabang, too, because now we have access to many more neighborhoods that aren't on the tourist circuit. We found a wonderful market with a silver area so my lovely daughter's Christmas request could be filled. Oh whoops, sorry to spoil the beans! Luang Prabang is in EXTREME high season right now so you don't need to hear me go on about how things have changed and everything is ruined by too many tourists, let's just call that the default setting on this blog, okay? It still has a lot of charm, and some really good food, and our favorite, Lao coffee, pitch black with a glop of sweetened condensed milk on the bottom of the glass, and monks chanting in the evening, and all the rest.

We used to come here to buy textiles and we'd sell them in the states to support a few very worthy literacy projects here in LP, we are phasing out of that kind of thing so probably won't buy anything here, we are seeing textile quality and authenticity going way down and who wants to ship or carry all that? Not us. But we eyeball them anyway, just in case we see a treasure or two. Otherwise, we stroll through the many temples and pet a lot of cats. Myanmar had puppies, Thailand and Laos are full of kittens, or at least, very small cats, usually black or calico. There has been one sad girl kitty wandering around our guesthouse in heat for several days, crying for a new boyfriend, day and night. We told her to put an ad on Craigslist and shut up already. The rest of the cats we see are adorable.

The next few days will see us take to our bikes again and do some serious (for us) riding south toward Thailand, following the Mekong. We are stocking up on local peanuts in various permutations, and looking at maps full of jungle and back roads and hills. I think I left my helmet mirror in the evil Pakbeng so I am trying not to obsess about replacing it until we get to a town in Thailand with a decent bike shop. I really like having a mirror but my handlebar grips don't allow one to be installed there.

Meeting other cyclists continues, in odd coincidental ways. We were parking the BFs at the market when a young fellow from Britain approached us on his well-used Surly, he had ridden all the way from home. This morning we were sitting at the coffee place and two fresh-faced Germans who started in Turkey sat down next to us. We chuckle at our own paltry mileage compared to all these great adventurers but we all agree that despite difficult days we are all having a ball, no matter how we choose to do this thing.

Today's ride: 19 miles (31 km)
Total: 287 miles (462 km)

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