20th of June: Luang Prabang, Laos
Today we arrived in Luang Prabang after a beautiful (but long) 2 day slowboat trip from Huay Xai! Yestday morning we had a very early start with breakfast at 6am after which a car picked us up and brought us to Chiang Khong where we crossed the river in a tiny speed boat which was absolutely full of people - a bit of a surprise as we all thought low season meant only few tourists!!
On the other side of the river it was time for our second "on-arrival-visa" experience which was quit confusing as there were so many people and our guide didn't really speak much English. With only one pen we slowly worked out way through large amounts of paper work for all 5 of us and after approximately 1 hour we were finally through passport control on the Laos side and had met our second guide of the day who was to take us to the slowboat.
If I'm to day it myself I find us usually relatively well prepared for everything but as we were only told 1 hour before the slowboat left that there was no food available on the 7 hour long boat trip we faced slight problems as Sebastian and Louise usually are hungry several times in a day. The problem was however solved by stocking up on Oreos, Mentos, water, Coca cola, crisps and sandwishes and we survived the many hours without any hunger at all :)
The boat left the pier at 11.30am but unfortunately we didn't get seats next to each other and so the birthday boy (Arne) had to sit by himself in the front of the boat - this did however turn out to be a much better seat than any of the rest of us got as we sat 5 meters from the motor which was rather noisy and it was pretty crowded down the back end of the boat! After 6½ hours we arrived in Pak Beng where we stayed in a nice little hotel which had a small restaurant overlooking the Mekong River - beautiful!!
This morning we continued the trip at 9.30 am! To get better seats we had decided to get up a bit early and head to the pier 40 minutes before departure - everyone else had unfortunately gotten the same idea so when we arrived there were only few seats left but we got 5 seats next to each other and all was grand. Yesterday the boat was pretty full but today was even more crazy as they had put in extra seats leaving most of us with 10 cm leg room - Arne, Lone and Sebastian got isle seats so they could stretch their legs while Louise and I were the young, flexible ones with our legs up near our ears... so it was a relatively long trip today but everyone was having a laugh about the limited space and we swopped seats every now and again so everyone survived :)
After arriving in Luang Prabang at 6pm we quickly found a restaurant where we had a lovely dinner before heading back to our hotel for an early night!
I will now head to bed,
Hope you are all well, sweet dreams
Susannah