Today, the German couple and I headed off on the two day slow boat ride down the Mekong River. There isn’t a lot to tell, but here are some picks I took on day 1.
At the end of the first day, we arrived in a very small town called Pak Beng. We grabbed our bags and went looking for a guesthouse to stay in. We found one charging 80 Lao Kip ($9 ). Since I was flying solo, there happened to be another solo traveler from Switzerland looking at rooms there. We ended up getting a room together to split the costs. Nice that I was able to cut my costs in half two days in a row!! After we got settled in, the four of us headed off to get some dinner.
As we were looking for dinner, we found that everyone has the number one restaurant on the street. We ended up going to one farther away from the rest, but we pretty much regreted the decision. The selling point was the free Lao moonshine the owner offered us. The stuff tasted like rubbing alchoal. I ended up taking down two shots of it. It was pretty strong, but made me feel pretty good! After dinner, we just headed back and got some sleep.
The next morning, the four of us got some breakfast and jumped on the boat. Here are a few photo I took from this leg of the journey on the Mekong. The temple in the cliff in picture two is the Pak Ou Caves, known as the Buddha Caves. I really wanted to stop here, but didn’t get to. There are supposed to be thousands of Buddha statues in the cave. Seemed pretty cool. The third picture was taken near the end of the ride with the German couple, with a crazy cool Aussie and German joining my crew!
Finally, we got to a dock outside Luang Prabang and we headed up a hill to get a tuk-tuk. There was a ticket office everyone was trying to get tickets from, but me had no patience for that and headed up the hill and just gave cash to a driver. Worked out great!
After we scouted out guesthouses, we joined each other for dinner. We all ordered a dish and shared them to try the different foods. Everything was very delicious. I even ended up running into the Swedish couple I sat next to on the bus from Chiang Mai, Thailand and the boarder! I do love that part of traveling like this, Sometimes you run into people multiple times at different parts of a trip!.
My Epic Journey- Tom's Travel Journal 