An excess of grandeur

"The Mekong forces its way between the lofty mountains with a noise resembling the roaring of the sea. There is almost an excess of grandeur. The eye rests constantly on these mountain slopes, clothed in the richest and thickest verdure."

So wrote explorer Henri Mouhot in his diary as he journeyed down the Mekong in 1860, becoming the first Westerner to ever penetrate northern Laos and make it to Luang Prabang. From his diaries it seems like little has changed in the past century, including the long wooden banana boat that we crowded onto for the Mekong journey, except that thanks to the invention of the outboard motor my trip took 2 days and his, 7 miserable months. He writes that some days he only made it about 1 mile, which begs the question why travel by boat at all (and/or, why leave Paris in the first place?). Also he seemed to encounter far more crocodile and tigers. Maybe our motor scared them off. We did see a dead pig corpse float past, belly up, if that counts as animal excitement?


The beginning of the boat trip was a little intense - the boatman loaded a basically insane number of locals, tourists, luggage, and other, ah, crap (sacks of rice, cages full of birds, you know, the usual) onto this one small slip of a wooden boat, and all the tourists, myself included, began to have a bit of a type-A freakout about personal space. After all we are going to be on this thing for 16 hours over the course of 2 days, and sitting on a wooden floor for that long is not the most comfortable situation even if you have all the space in the world to sprawl.


But about 30 minutes into the trip everyone seemed to calm down and accept the Zen nature of whooshing down the giant muddy Mekong. I managed to find myself a seat at the very top front lip of the boat, right next to one of the aforementioned cages of birds, my back to a sack of rice, my legs hanging off the front lip and occasionally getting splashed, and many hours passed very peacefully this way. The scenery was nothing short of constantly spectacular - very fjord-like, actually, with the green mountains plunging in dramatic V's right up from the water - and at least every four of five minutes was some interesting form of life on the riverbank, whether it be a herd of water buffalo, a fisherman poling a longboat, or a random small child running naked along the bank. I napped on and off, read my Mouhot diary, and especially in the slanting afternoon light was breathless to actually be on such a stunningly beautiful trip.

We stayed overnight in Pakbeng which is essentially a collection of shacks on the riverbank for the purpose of housing everyone on this voyage. I handed over my $4 for the room and broke out the sleepsack again: the Sheraton, this was not. In fact, Pakbeng only has electricity for a brief period each evening, so late at night and again in the morning I had to grope through the dark, not perfectly clean bathroom....hmm, let's think no more upon that.

Day 2 looked just like day 1 on the Mekong, except that everyone was calmer about space, and we actually left around 9:30 AM instead of departing at Noon as the day before (and to clarify, we were mostly all loaded by 9 AM the day before...the boat just hung around until Noon because, well, I don't really know why. There isn't a strong sense of the concept of time here.) We pulled into Luang Prabang at sunset which looked exactly like photo below (those are our boats!), and is just an astonishingly adorable, beautiful village, at least as close as there is going to be such a thing in SE Asia. Dozens of wats, the orange robed monks, street upon street of red-rooved two story colonial homes, and the intersection of two major rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Ou.

I am staying at what would pass in the US as a luxury spa outside of town for $35 a night, with my own private bungalow in a manicured tropical garden, and a balcony overlooking the quieter Nam Ou River. My hotel even provides a cushy lounger on the balcony and they bring me breakfast at my bungalow in the morning. No sleep sack needed tonight!