Day 1: Up early to get the mini-van to the border and a speed boat over the Mekong River into Laos. We all finished sorting our Visas out and then had some breakfast, waiting for the slow boat to depart at 11.30am. It was going to be 2 days of boat-rides along the Mekong River (with a village stop-over in between) to take us to Luang Prabang. Better than an 18 hour bus journey I hoped.
Really enjoyed the boat ride. It went VERY slow but I sat with Kent and Stafan and we chatted and played cards with Adam the whole way. Great banter with them - their english is pretty good but they both sound quite robotic with it so I tried to help out with certain words. In turn, they attempted to teach me some Swedish, which isn't the easiest language to learn shall we say (I can now count to 10 and say thanks - that took about half an hour) Great laugh though and all really nice lads. Played a couple of Swedish card games (they both won - think we were being stitched) and one that I recommended. Unfortunately, Kent won that one as well.
Stopped for photos of some river villages along the way, which was pretty cool. The views from the boat were amazing too - lots of mountains either side and very dense forest. It did take longer to get to our stop-over village than had been told though - 7 hours instead of 5. Didn't care though as the whole journey had been really fun.
Arrived at Pak Beng Village early evening and checked into a guest-house with my new swedish friends. We then went out for some traditional Laos food (minced buffalo and sticky rice - very spicy but nice) and some beers at the only bar in the village. Everyone from the boat was there and we all sat around chatting for hours. Met a really nice German couple (Miriam and Jakob), 2 dutch girls and some other English lads, who have been drunk for the complete duration of their trip by the sounds of it! All in all, a good evening meeting loads of cool people.
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