Of pink pigs and opium ...

We safely arrived in Pakbeng some nine hours after leaving Luang Prabang and after having made various stops on the way, some of them involving beaching the boat in order to allow the passengers to disembark.  The tribesman took his corrugated iron roofing, the monks their boxes and the villagers their New Year's gifts of food and bags of rice and chillis.  On one occasion we beached so well that it took the force of several passengers to free the vessel.

Pink pigs ... when we set off from Luang Prabang Mr W spotted what looked like a very big pink pig on the shore, admittedly it was quite a long way off but it did look like a huge pig ... we debated and decided that it must be a pig, only to discover as we went up river that there were herds of buffalos along the riverbank and amongst these were pink skinned beasts!!! Never having seen a pink buffalo before, our pink pig was most certainly a pink buffalo.  You can imagine that this caused the odd laugh or two!

In my dim and distant past I may well have considered trying opium (not!), but we really didn't expect the first question that we would be asked on landing at Pak Beng to be "You want to smoke opium?" - do we really look the types??  

Mekong Scenery

Pink pigs ... well, buffalos really

Monks disembarking

The Hmong's corrugated cargo