Cruising and Boozing Down the Mekong

When we decided to take the cheapest two-day slow boat option down the Mekong to Luang Prabang in Laos, we did wonder what was in store. No frills seating, dodgy toilets, that sort of thing. But with a price difference of £100 each, we were happy enough to give it a whirl. What we didn’t bargain for was that we’d be on a party boat with 150 gap year 20 somethings in elephant print trousers. And that it would be great!
The fun begins after we cross the Thai Lao border at Chiang Khong and ‘take our seats’. I use the term loosely, like the seats themselves, which are freestanding ripped out bus seats, each slightly different and each slightly wobbly. We watch the backpacking youngsters load onto the boat. Some more experienced travellers have small, neat packs covered with a waterproof liner; others have obviously done too much Thai shopping and have hopelessly large packs with extras stuffed and rigged onto the outside. They totter like flipped turtles as they stagger up the gangplank and onto the boat. Ahead of them is Lola, a well-blessed Chicago gal on a world tour, with large Sailor Jim tattoos covering her ample lily-white arms and legs. She obviously hasn’t read the backpacking gap year websites and, inexplicably, is attempting to hoik on board a huge boxy wheeled black suitcase, equal in weight and size to her. I really do wonder if there are people being smuggled inside it. The Lao boat crew look at each other in disbelief and sigh as they have sight of the suitcase. She shrugs, “Everything a girl needs when travelling, right?”
A young guy behind whispers in French, “Bien sur, she brings her pet elephant with her too.”
Cruising along the Mekong for hours, we flow past mile after mile of dense jungle gorges of staggering beauty, past buffalo herds on the mud sandbanks and see Lao people catching fish and threshing crops on the river’s edge. All the while, the boat steers carefully past dangerous rocks, navigating fast currents and avoiding perilous whirlpools. Most of our boat companions seem oblivious to all of this, as the beer starts flowing immediately we set sail. An hour in, the boat has to pull up to a village on the side of the Mekong where more crates of beer are loaded and swapped for empties. We stop a total of five more times for “refuelling” during the day.
On the boat, by this time we’re all bezzy mates, apart from one Italian lady who when she asked where we’re from, replied, “Wales, is that even a country?”
“Nid yw hon ar fap”, I think and decide there’s no point responding, drifting away, which is fine as she seems only interested in her own conversation anyway. And as you do, we soon get sharing the craic with some fellow Celts, a group from County Clare in Ireland (which is also a country, by the way). They are a mix of two young lads with their girlfriends and four older friends in their fifties. An unlikely lot to be out on the Mekong. It seems their holiday was a spontaneous decision formed recently in the village pub when they all decided to accompany their mate who had been to Laos before. By the sixth pint bottle of Lao beer, one of the young Irish girls staggers back to us from the bar area at the back of the boat, “The fecking captain’s sent me back here” she complains, “He thinks I might fall in the water.”
“Oh No!” interjects Angie, one of the older members of the gang, looking up from her phone. She explains that she’s funding the trip by booking out her house on Air BnB but a text from her son has just informed her that all of her bookings have been cancelled and she’s been banned from the site.
“I don’t believe it, “ she complains,“The guest found me magpie gun. Thinks we’re IRA. How was I to feckin’ know that Air BnB won’t let yer have guns in yer house!”
And as the sun sets over the Mekong, we finally reach Luang Prabang where we all say our goodbyes. But over the next few days, we have a hundred new friends as we bump into our happy-boat-bezzies all around the town and feel immeasurably the richer for having chosen the budget slow boat.