After taking the ferry to Laos I boarded a "slow boat", a long, slender motorboat with two rows of wildly uncomfortable wooden benches. This is one such boat passing us on the river.
Here's a view of the aisle of the boat when we made a brief stop and were boarded by an army of Lao girls with plastic baskets of Coke, potato chips and Beerlao to sell at extortionate rates.
Laos is perhaps the least developed country I've traveled in. One thing I realized after two seven-hour days on the river is that we hadn't passed a single bridge! I saw villages of thatch huts with no electricity, where people fish from handmade wooden canoes.
Just sitting there for hours on end watching the scenery glide by was one of the highlights of the trip thus far.
I sat on the right, or south, side of the boat the first day, and got cooked by the sun. That night we slept in Pak Beng, a little town that seems to exist solely as a overnight stopping point for the slow boats. This is sunset.
And this is sunrise.
It was quite spooky. I sat on the left (north) side of the boat so I wouldn't be in the sun. And I froze my butt off. Nights in northern Thailand were much cooler than had I expected but that morning it was uncomfortably cold.
The Mekong itself is, well, ugly. It's a sick brown color, even though the rainy season is long since over. The log perched on the left side of the big rock illustrates how high the river can get during the rainy season.
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