Boat Trip & Pakbeng

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Finally seated on the boat in some ripped out commuter bus seats, nailed into the floor, we were on our way down the Makoun River heading for Luang Prabeng. This was called the slow boat trip, which is generally thought of one of the best adventures South East Asia has to offer. Brushing the quality of boat/seats aside you could see instantly why this is so popular with great views of wildlife, the surrounding villages at the waters edge & huge mountains.

Our first stop was Pakbeng where I had heard that the village is run on a generator after 11pm, so all lights will suddenly go out for a split second at this time. I had also heard that the village was patrolled by people with machines guns, these people being young children...crazy!? Needless to say we made sure we got back well before 11 after dinner at one of the local bars. The service was brilliant, one person gets served at a time as the man who owned the place was chef, bar man, father of two etc etc, luckily mine was out first so I went for it whilst everyone watched haha.

We made it back to our hostel early so decided to play some drinking games with some beers & Samsung we bought on the way back. This game is called ring of fire, which seems to be internationally known. You lay the cards face down around one pint glass in the middle and eacgh take it in turns topick one, each card means different things. As you can imagine, it got messy. I ended up as pose & dance master at one point so kept getting everyone doing stupid poses (as they have to copy my pose/dance) & Dance moves. We also cracked out the facepaint and I ended up looking like something off of Last of the mohicans! Brilliant night, where all 15 of us had great laughs and can safely say, woke up with hangovers!

Highlight of this trip, my mate leaving his bag in the restaurant went went to....which had passport, driving license, camera, phone & wallet in, WELL DONE LAIRY!!

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