The Boat to Luang Prabang

Nong Khiew was beautiful, but there was really nothing to do there. There are just a few restaurants and bars. One of the bars, run by a Westerner, shows movies every evening. I went there one of the two nights we stayed in Nong Khiew to see "True Romance"; the showing was delayed by almost an hour by one power outage, then given an unplanned half-hour intermission by another. We all lit candles and chatted and played Jenga and drank warm Beer Lao and peered into the absolute darkness.

The day after that, Monique and I got on a long boat to head down the Nam Ou River to Luang Prabang, where the Nam Ou meets the Mekong. Sixteen of us piled into the boat, which only had four actual seats:

We gave those up to the older travelers in the crowd. The rest of us perched or squatted on narrow wooden benches built a few inches off the bottom of the boat.

It was really, really uncomfortable. For seven hours.

But the scenery was worth it.  We coasted along the river gazing at irregular, impressive mountains:

and sheer, towering rock faces, fascinatingly shaped and stained with rain and river: 

one or two of which turned out to be hiding mysterious-looking caves:

I'm fairly sure a wizard lives there. Also, it's hard to take level photos from a boat. 

Initially, the river was pretty much deserted. We stopped once for our driver to change the rudder or something (I'm not an engineer) and found ourselves wading along a soft, sandy shoreline in the serene quiet of water and wilderness.

We only occasionally passed other boaters:

...generally locals fishing or transporting goods. We saw more blissful, bathing buffaloes than people:

...but the closer we got to Luang Prabang the more small villages we saw, perched on the steep river banks.

These "flame trees" come in bright yellow and bright red, and punctuate the jungle of Thailand and Laos. Phenomenal. 

With almost every village were children playing in the shallows, escaping the heat of the day. They waved and grinned at us from the water.

We all piled out of the boat twice when the river got too rough to navigate with passengers, walking a short distance and meeting our driver once he had maneuvered through the rapids. The first time we just hiked along a path the bordered the river:

But the second we trekked through a humble but neat village:

I love that someone's always got a satellite dish. 

People piled out of their houses to see us pass by- it was clearly en event- and when we headed back to the boat some of the kids followed to push the boat into deeper water.

In the last hour or two of the trip we started to see more established structures- buildings that looked as though they might be resorts but were deserted, hopefully just for the low season:

I'm pretty impressed with this photo. 

 And then finally we saw the Pak Ou cave, a cave temple turned tourist trap just north of Luang Prabang.

And we had finally arrived, stiff and cramped from hours of sitting. We nodded to one another and then scattered in search of clean hotel rooms and cold beer.