Last slow boat down the Mekgong

The last slow boat down the Mekong leaves Pak Lai at 9:00 in the morning for Vientiane. The plastic on the grease board in the dilapidated ticket office was peeling off its backing but the words Foreigners Pay 120,000 kip - Slow Boat were easy enough to read. There were plenty of other squiggly lines and numbers ranging from 30,000 to 60,000 but I don't read Lao and even if I did they wouldn't have applied to me.

The stout woman sitting at her desk jolted her head up and gave me a surprised look before saying "one twenty thousand kip." In reply I held up several fingers and multiplied the price accordingly. A small brick of notes, and a few slips of xeroxed paper later, she fell back to her slumber and I became a ticketed passenger. Suzanne and I picked our way through the weeds piercing the concrete steps down to the last slow boat in Laos and the last slow boat to run the Mekong. Two days of living as a human pinball inside the steel back end of Tuk-Tuks and buses brought us here for this very journey. Roads go in a straight line, trucks, buses and even Tuk-Tuks get the job done fast, cheap and at scheduled intervals. Slow boats, meander with the river, suck down fuel and if you really want to get somewhere then they are the last choice for all but sentimental travelers and those living in a backwater with few roads to anywhere like Pak Lai.


With tickets stuffed into a random and briefly forgotten pocket I dropped my McDonald's padded butt onto my choice of miniature hardwood seats. A few Lao looked up to smile at me from the other seats as if to silently ask, "Why are you here? Why are you doing this?" At the front of this cigar shaped steel craft two twin girls in bright dresses are sleeping on bags of rice as their mother struggles to keep a basket of chicks from escaping.

"Ticket!" The order from a boy-man in an ill-fitting green shirt and pants clashed brutally with the pace of the river flowing by.

"Age!"
"37"
"Profession!"
"Real estate" This at least earned a pause as the angry man-child scribbled in his book.
"You pay 5000 kip me!" My face must have briefly registered a question though my mind understood perfectly, You pay me bribe now please "You need stamp there" he said pointing vaguely at the shore. "You pay 5000 kip fine to me!" Then for emphasis, "I am police man!"
"Yes of course." And after I paid all the other Lao on the boat dutifully stumped up their fine and received their stamps as well.

When our boat swung its bow into the oncoming current and bent its course down stream it occurred to me that old diesel engines "do not go gently into that good night." Instead they roar, bellow, thrash, belch, and breath fire to their dying breath. An old truck diesel engine knows how to rage. They do not however, know how to rage quickly and our pace is perfectly in keeping with the term 'slow boat.'

Sticky haze, flocks of birds, rice paddies, and the wooden bench turned hard as granite under my butt cheeks. Yet with only a few scattered stops, and a few additional passengers the boat rode high in the water down the Mekong. With plenty of room to stretch I thought of the 3 day journey to Vientiane that could have been done for the same money in one hour on a plane.

The Mekong is still a sleepy place where life can drift along, spin in an whirlpool, get caught on protruding sticks with just a few plastic bags for company before eventually moving onward. Around the river however, the world has accelerated. People and the lives they live move faster now and the slow boats with their inefficient meandering just don't fit any more.

Of course there are a few other boats still plying the rivers in Laos and I did not ride the last but their path is clear. Drunken tourists looking to taste the Laos of old will support a few rides much like they support rides in traveling amusement parks but the old slow boats loaded with bags or rice, chickens, and monks on the roof are now walking into the sunset and the credits are starting to roll.

Structural Flaws

So who was the half-brain, nitwit, incompetent baboon that invented this place?! I have spent countless days, dollars and gallons of sweat trying to find a nice little corner of the world and it turns out that this pathetic excuse for a world is ROUND! There are no corners, not even here in Laos. Now this lapse into unparalleled stupidity would not be so bad were it not for the fact that the world is worse than just round. If it were simply round I could at least walk off the edge but the world is actually a maddeningly perfect sphere. No corners, no edges and it is impossible to be anywhere but in the center. Everywhere I have gone I have looked around and seen nothing but planet stretching out in every direction. In Boulder I am in the center of the world with beer, college students and wanna-be-Olympians running up the mountains and a geopolitical mess stretching as far as the mind's eye can see in the background. And here in Laos I am in the middle of the world with orange-clad monks slowly walking the streets at dawn collecting their day's sticky rice in begging bowls while walking in perfect silence. The background looks just the same here as it does everywhere, stretching out into the same frustrating enigma.

Despite this fundamental structural flaw in the construction of reality some things here in this not-corner of the world are refreshingly different. Last night Suzanne and I sat on a sidewalk drinking Lao-Beer (pretty good beer actually) and chewing on grilled chicken skewers when a stray dog took exception to her use of his spot on the side walk. He marked her chair and dress as his own and walked on to his next errand. And in this not-corner of the world we paused for only a moment, shrugged and kept eating. In some centers of the world it is easier to shrug than in others.

So far the shrugging in Laos has been particularly easy. Perhaps it is the constant sticky heat, the cold lager, or the stream of monks slowly and deliberately walking the streets that makes the difference. Perhaps I am just another sentimental tourist enjoying something that is different from my home.