PakBeng - Laos

June 7th - 8th, 2016

Waking up early we were lucky enough to catch the cool of the morning as we walked out of the town and down to the pier where we bought our tickets for the Slow Boat that travels down the Mekong to Luang Prabang, one of the supposed 'must do's' on the SE Asia travel trail. After purchasing our tickets we were thankfully able to put our bags on board before heading back up the hill to find breakfast and some food to take with us for the trip. We had heard that the price of food on board was extortionate and given our experience the previous night had already decided to take our own rather than face prices we couldn't afford or starve! Our limited budget stretched to a fruit juice each for breakfast and a chicken salad roll and bag of banana crisps to take with us for lunch. When it was nearly time to go we got on to the boat which was decked out with nice looking tables and chairs for the most part and what looked like ex-minibus seats for the rest, found our seats, luckily with a table and settled ourselves in. Before very long we realised that this trip was not going to be anything like the one we had taken down the Amazon a few years ago as we'd hoped, peaceful, gentle, full of stunning views and plenty of wildlife, instead it was going to be our worst nightmare....being stuck on a boat for 2 days with nowhere to escape from the multitude of other travellers who were only interested in drinking as much Beerlao or Whiskey (the local brews) and making as much noise as possible! It was horrible, the raucous, immature crowd of ignorant idiots around us, no where to go to even stretch your legs other than to the toilet and back, the amazingly loud engine that reverberated through the whole boat and not even any particularly interesting scenery to look at! I can tell you that the first 6hr leg of the journey was only made more dreadful by the thought of having to do it all over again tomorrow, so even the relief of landing at the little village of PakBeng (our overnight stop off) was short lived once we'd fought our way through the touts trying to get us to go in their tuk tuk or to their hotel. The final straw of the day was when we arrived at our accommodation and they tried to charge us 50% extra to use the aircon in the room! We had already paid a tout at the start of the day (more to forgoe the hassle later on than anything else) and he had told us of his lovely hotel with free wifi, aircon and pick up from the boat, so this is what we expected when we got there, not for them to try and make us pay more for something we already thought we had paid for. Luckily the woman was so busy with checking people in that she had already given me the remote for the aircon before demanding the money and when I refused she rang up the tout back in Houay Xai. Andy spoke to him on the phone explaining that he hadn't said aircon was extra and that we wouldn't be paying for it as he had mis-sold us the hotel, when he suddenly hung up the phone, threw it back at the lady saying he wasn't going to be threatened and stalked off into our room. Locking the door behind us I found out the tout had started saying all sorts of things about how he knew where our parents lived and this that and the other and so I fully agreed that the thing to do was stuff him and the owners, that is not the way to deal with your own screw ups and frankly not what we had heard to expect from the 'super friendly people' in Laos! Angry and not feeling that Laos was all we had heard it to be, we waited in our room (with the aircon on full blast) for the torrential rain that had started just after we arrived to subside then went out for a rather measly dinner of fried rice before going to bed.