I think we may well need a paddle shortly ... we left Luang Prabang at 08:40 this morning on the slow boat to Pakbeng (guess ultimately up the Mekong to China!) - we're making our way north to Bokeo province with a stop on the way at Pakbeng. Good job that the tour agency that we booked the tickets through had us on the boat at 07:40 because it slowly filled and filled and filled with everything from people of all sorts (tourists young and old, locals, tribes people, monks), bikes, motorbikes, corrugated iron roofing, slabs of ice, sacks of chillis, sacks of rice, boxes of who knows what and copious quantities of food. It seems that all the locals are either eating or sleeping! We've scraped the bottom a couple of times and ascended rapids rather than descended them - a potentially interesting experience given the partially submerged nasty looking jagged rocks that we've been passing - Mr W's eyebrows raising on a few occasions.
The Mekong is interesting, we've seen it more than a couple of kilometres wide in the south of the country to only several metres wide in this area (north of Luang Prabang) and it is easy to see from the markings on the rocks how high and low it gets in the various seasons - currently quite low despite very unseasonal heavy rainfall. An amazing life supporter for villages and villagers who fish, wash, gold pan, play on the river banks - the steep river banks making natural slides for the village children. Water buffalos happily wallow in the water.
Mekong Scenery
Logging on the Mekong
Sand Dunes on the Mekong
Fishing on the Mekong
Local children entertaining themselves on the boat
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