By boat to Luang Prabang

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Sunday December, 30th 2007

After many hesitations, I've chosen to take the boat to Luang Prabang. It's a 2-day journey on the Mekong river. The boat is slowly starting to fill up. Some slightly too large wooden benches are hastily replaced by smaller ones to accommodate (or rather pack up) more passengers. The diversity of the passengers is amazing: an old French couple, an Australian family, local people carrying large bags, the serb couple who were at the guest house, a girl with a lot of piercing, tattoos on her thighs and a larger tattoo going down from her shoulders to her breasts (je suppose que comme les poils verts des “bancs publics” de Brassens (version étudiante), ils sont là sans doute pour ajouter de la couleur à ce qui fait notre bonheur), a group of Chilean students... The Chileans are celebrating the 25th birthday of one girl of the group. All along the way on the first day, their singing, playing and lively chatting will cheer up the atmosphere on the boat. It's good to have such a group on the boat, though not everybody agrees with me on that point. It's also good that not everybody is like that on the boat otherwise the boat would be wrecked, and on that point almost everybody agrees.

All along the way, the landscape is amazing. The boat navigates among boulders that are spread in the river. On both sides of the river, we are surrounded by mountains sometimes covered with forests sometimes completely bare.

At 5 PM, we are landing in Pakbeng, a small town that lives at the rhythm of the boats arrivals.

I've a nice evening dining with a Czech guy, his Japanese girlfriend and an American, quite an international table.

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