This 8 part series of blogs are written by Felix from Germany, who joined me for the adventure down the Mekong River. I have not edited any of the grammar as it portrays his voice better in this form. Thanks Felix!
It was a good feeling to get back on the river after having recovered in Pak Lay. It was maybe the first day that was really cloudy, which was actually a nice change. On that day the Mekong kept us quite busy. That means the time was rare were we could just float, relax and enjoy the landscape.
That part of the Mekong was really wild. There were all the time huge islands or stripes of lands in the Mekong. Really like splitting the river into one or more smaller rivers for a while. And often these islands were surrounded by many more small islands and big rocks that showed out of the water. It was just like a random fusion of river and land. Additionally, there were like islands of trees that showed out of the water between one and two meters high.
We were basically just paddling from one dangerous situation to the next. Accordingly, Markus had to stand up a lot on the boat and determine the least dangerous route, call out to me to paddle even harder and spontaneously react to new upcoming dangers. So, on that we nearly sunk the boat again more than one time and had to bail out the boat several times. Often it was just like a chain of dangerous situations building up.
It started maybe with rapids and rocks in the water and when we just passed the rocks there was suddenly a big whirlpool showing up which we needed to avoid followed by some trees ranging out of the water. So, on that day we almost didn’t paddle when there was a part of the river where the river was safe as we needed those parts to recover and save energy for the next upcoming dangerous parts.
One time there was again an island in the Mekong which was surrounded by rocks which made it really dangerous to pass and would have required some fast direction changes to avoid hitting a rock. So we decided to go on the island and pull the boat through this sketchy part which was still hard enough.
Also this part of the river required a lot physical and mental energy from us, the boost of adrenalin in those situations and the pleasant feeling after we managed a dangerous situation still always felt great. Additionally, there were also really nice quite parts where we could just float through islands of crowns of trees that ranged out of the water, which was just magical.
On the last part of the day the river became a bit calmer and some light rain dropped in which was nice refreshing. At about 5pm we stopped at an small village called ‘Houayla’ which was just in the last bend of the Mekong before the Mekong would mark the border between Laos and Thailand almost all the way down to Cambodia.
We found again a nice family that invited us to stay at their home and spent a nice evening together with a good dinner, some dictionary based conversation and a little bit of playing with the two kids of our host family. The dinner basically was some traditional meat dishes and two bowls of snails which came with two big wooden baskets of sticky rice.
On the next day we were back on the river at about 9am. And after making a few hundred meters on the Mekong we were basically travelling in ‘no man’s land’ now. Because as mentioned earlier from that point onwards on our left side there was Laos and on the right side there was Thailand. So to keep the potential of getting into problems small we always tried to stay more on the left side of the river than on the right side as we both had visa for Laos and not for Thailand.
However, we still knew that it would probably be not easy to avoid getting unwanted attention being foreigners on the border river between two countries. There were actually from time to time some border controls on the side of the river. The border controls were some small houses on the side of the river with some border police boats before it in the water.
Whenever, we noticed that a border control was coming up on the side of the river, we aimed to pass it quite fast to reduce the probability of getting detected by a border control. Normally, we passed about two to four border controls on one day starting from that day on.
Besides that the river was still quite ‘interesting’ on that part and required us to paddle a lot. Around the late afternoon we started to look out for a place to spend the night. From now on we were a bit more restricted to find a place to spend the night as we could only look out for places on the Laos side of the Mekong.
After a while we saw a temple coming up on the Laos’ side of the river. The temple and corresponding village were actually again not on Google maps, but it was close before another small village called Pak Chom. We decided to stop and shortly after we stopped at the side of the temple a middle-aged monk showed up and welcomed us. He could actually speak English quite good. After a short conversation he said that we could spend the night in the temple area. We thanked him and brought our stuff to the temple. He even offered us to sleep in the temple, but we said that we would be fine to spend the night outside.
So, Markus just put up a mosquito net under the porch roof of the temple and I put up the tent on the grass. Thereafter, the Monk invited us for a coffee in the place where he slept. It was a really basic wooden hat consisting of two rooms.
Besides him, there were two small kid monks who were just hanging around with some other kids from the small village that was close to the temple. After a while the kids also showed up and went to the hat of the monk to watch television, which the older monk also did after we finished our coffee and went for a bucket shower.
For me it’s still a strange combination if a monk watches television. Anyway, after the bucket shower, we went for a small walk to a market where they had all kind of fresh vegetables and grilled food. We bought a lot of vegetables, especially a lot of those long green beans they had and went back to the temple where the monk brought us some bowls and cutlery for our food. We also invited him to share dinner with us, however, he had already eaten.
We left early on the next day thanking the monk for letting us spend the night at the temple area. As this part of the Mekong was still covered by many small islands we decided to spend the coming night one more time on one of those small islands. Around lunch time we stopped in a small village to get some food for lunch and dinner. After we had enough food we stopped at a small islands, set up the parasol which I had bought in Pak Lay and enjoyed our lunch.
Thereafter, we continued for a couple of hours on the river passing some nice cliffs and enjoying the landscape. On the late afternoon we stopped at a quite big Mekong islands with a small forest in the middle of it. We prepared our quarter for the night. However, apparently, there was also someone else on the island when we arrived. At least once we heard shots coming from the other part of the island and a short while after we heard a boat leaving the island, assuming or better hoping that we were alone now on the island. We set up a bonfire and enjoyed our dinner and some beer before getting a good sleep.
On the next day we left quite early, before 7am. It was nice being on the river so early. The sun had just raised and was still searching its way through the small clouds that looked like little sheep. It was again an exciting day on the river with a lot of paddling and one stop in a small village to get some lunch.
In the evening we stopped in the middle-sized village Ban Pak Ton. It was again my time to arrange a place for the night. So, I started to walk around and asked a group of young men for a place to stay. They explained to me in body language that there was a guest house about five kilometers down the road and offered to take us there on their motor bikes. It took actually quite long until we got so far in the conversation using mainly body language and it was of course even more difficult to explain to them that my friend cannot go on a motorbike.
Anyway, I kept on searching, but was not really successful. While searching I noticed that the problem was that there was a guest house close by. So people always advised me to go to the guest house. Accordingly, I think it’s probably easier to get invited to stay with a family if there is no guesthouse around.
One guy who was the owner of a small gas station actually advised me not to spend the night in that village as it was apparently really dangerous and we may get robbed or even killed. However, he could not name a real reason, he just kept on repeating that this place is dangerous.
Actually, I didn’t really know how to react to it or how much value I should spend to his words because I never really felt unsafe during my time travelling. Anyway, another woman I met shortly afterwards mentioned a temple where we could ask to spend the night.
So, I returned to Markus and we took our stuff and went to look for the temple. It took us about half an hour until we finally found the temple. One monk invited us to stay at the temple. While Markus went to the village to grab some food for us an older monk showed up and looked quite skeptical at me and didn’t seemed to be amused to see me here. Shortly after that the younger monk came back again and talked to the older monk which clarified the situation.
As soon as Markus was back from the village the young monk showed us the bath place and then insisted that we should spend the night in the temple. We also said that we would just sleep outside, but he really insisted that we sleep in the temple. So, we followed him to the temple. Markus inflated his camping mat and installed his mosquito net and I just slept on the floor covering myself with the mosquito net.
In the morning we woke up to the sound of a big drum at around 6am. Shortly afterwards the monks came and swept the yard for about half an hour. Thereafter, a wooden metal bell rang and all the monks gathered together and left the temple to the village, probably going to collect alms. We packed our stuff and also left the temple to go for some noodle soup breakfast.
Thereafter, we went to the boat and were back on the river. On that day we knew our destination for the day. It was the capital of Laos, Vientiane. We paddled quite a lot that day. But not because the river required us to, we just paddled because we were motivated to reach the capital.
We made two stops in between. One was at an amazing temple, which was so far the nicest temple area I had seen. The temple actually kind of invited us to visit it, as there was suddenly out of nowhere this huge golden colored stairs going down directly to the Mekong. So, we stopped with our boat on the stairs and followed the stairs to the temple area. It was a nice big temple area with a lot of plants and flowers surrounding the different buildings.
A couple of minutes after we arrived we met a monk who invited us to join him and the other monks for lunch. However, we had just eaten so we didn’t join them. He also showed us a monkey that they kept tied on a rope. Markus let the monkey crawl on his arm and suddenly the monkey bit him. Accordingly, Markus tried to get rid of him, which he managed after waving his hands about. Additionally, it turned out that the monkey also shit on Markus.
Regards that small incident, it was really nice at the temple area. As soon as we were back on the river Markus cleaned his shirt in the Mekong. However, his shirt was probably dirtier after cleaning it in the Mekong than before.
At about lunch time we made another short stop on a little island and went for a dip in the Mekong, more to refresh than to clean ourselves. And about two hours later we finally saw Vientiane coming up in front of us.
The closer we got to the city the more boats we passed on the river. It was a nice feeling to finally reach Vientiane. We were actually quite grateful and proud of ourselves that we really made it all the way from Pakbeng (where we started our journey) to Vientiane.
We probably made around 800 kilometers on the Mekong and the Nam Houng river in the last three weeks. So, we celebrated our arrival in Vientiane in the first ‘boat restaurant’ that showed up on the side of the river. It was basically a big boat that was rearranged to a restaurant/bar. We just stopped with our boat beneath the restaurant boat and climbed up the big boat. There we clinked glasses with a nice cold beer and just enjoyed the moment.
After we finished the beer we left again on our boat and found a good place to park our boat. We just parked it behind another restaurant boat and asked some young guys who worked there if that would be ok. They were totally fine with it and also invited us to try some spicy rice and vegetables they had just prepared. Then we grabbed our stuff and went into the city.
